Breath,Breathing,and Australian anti-Asian Racism: Critical Collaborative Autoethonography as Anti-Racist Inquiry

Abstract

Racialised violence against Asian communities, (re)illuminated and (re)amplified during events like COVID-19 and the 2021 Atlanta massacre, reflects global patterns of anti-Asian racism. In Australia, Asian communities face similar everyday racisms rooted in Orientalist fears of the invading Other. This critical co-constructed autoethnography by two Asian Australian educators examines the entanglement of anti-Asian racism and the metaphor of breath to interrogate the suffocating nature of Australia’s race relations. Through collaborative embodied vignettes, we explore how racism restricts belonging and movement, acknowledge entanglements with ongoing colonial violence against First Nations peoples, and seek solidarities through a politics of hope.

Breathing in and out

I ¹ (Amy) hear him before I see him, ‘You fucking bitches don’t even speak our language’.

The quiet chattering of commuters instantly descends into silence. His corpulent frame clumsily lumbers up the bus steps and into the seat behind as his tirade continues, ‘I’m talking to you two fucking bitches’. The acidic stench grows stronger as his voice becomes more insistent, ‘Stop fucking speaking, you two fucking bitches don’t speak my language. You need to fucking go back to your fucking country’.

I breathe in. ² My mind is in overdrive as shock and fear hold me captive in my body. The humourless irony doesn’t escape me. As an English teacher, I couldn’t help but notice the interesting use of the possessive pronouns ‘our’ and ‘my’ as if language was something that could be owned or exclusive. Or the fact that if I did return to my own country, I would still be here because I was born in Australia.

I see in my peripheral vision the agitated state of his body language rising along with the aggressive shouting. I am immediately drawn back to reality by the ice-cold claws of fear. This was not the first time I had experienced this rhetoric, ³ but it was the first time I truly felt physically threatened. The moving bus is a cage. So, I choose to do the only thing I can at that moment. I stare straight ahead, breath held. Perhaps if I refused to acknowledge his presence, his words would return to the void.

‘I fucking understand what you’re saying. You cunts don’t speak my language, I speak a thousand fucking languages. I fucking own your pussy, I own your fucking children, and your children’s children’.

Hot humiliation washes over me as I am reduced to just an object. Powerlessness. That his words are only directed to the females. Anger. Because his audacity astounds me. He continues to repeat his words like a broken record. But all my words are stifled by the overwhelming terror that he could so easily physically retaliate.

I get off at the next possible stop and make sure I sit at the front near the bus driver. Only then do I allow myself to breathe out a sigh of relief.

Intra-Active Collaboration/Writing/Collaborative Writing (Part One)

As racial minority first and second-generation migrant settlers – of Singaporean Chinese (Aaron) and Taiwanese (Amy) heritage – we acknowledge that our collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing happens on First Nations land where sovereignty was never ceded, and as minoritised settlers, acknowledge our racialised entanglement with/in the strangulation of Indigenous rights. We thus write with/in solidarity with First Nations peoples to ‘probe, mock, displace, jar, or reconstruct the dominant tale or narrative’ (Lyotard, 1984, p.xviii) of pervasive racial injustice and broader systemic racism in so-called ‘Australia’.

Our questioning of this (racialised) metanarrative (Lyotard, 1984) avoids the welcoming and placid waters of ‘conventional humanist qualitative inquiry’ (St. Pierre, 2013, p.654) and is taken up as an entangled act of collaborative writing where ‘words like “collaborative,” “writing,” “method,” and “inquiry”… lose any given-ness their various usages here might suggest’ (Wyatt & Gale, 2014, p.296). We recognise that there is no beginning to writing (Gale & Wyatt, 2025) and thus start in the middle via a modality that intra-acts with our bodies that attempt to write collaboratively (Gale & Wyatt, 2016). In this intra-action, we foreground the vibrancy of relationality (Gale & Wyatt, 2016) with stories that ‘speak of who we are in a way that justly recognizes the constitutive relationships between others and ourselves’ (Assoulin & Bacaller, 2024, p.18). In this intra-action, self and other are inextricably linked ‘with our use and understanding of the linguistic and moral resources made available to us in the cultures we are brought up in’ (Douglas & Carless, 2014, p.306).

Indeed, our relational intra-action as ‘writers’ is embedded with interconnected meanings from familial and cultural narratives since birth (Douglas & Carless, 2014), including broader world events and concomitant colonial legacies that shape our families’ ongoing histories and our evolving transnational subjectivities (Lee et al., 2024). Like our writing, our varied transnational trajectories into ‘Australia’ are not exclusively synonymous with geographical origins, but rather, an in-between space of fissure, flow, and fracture that remains open to new possibilities ⁴ (Lee et al., 2024). Put differently, this intra-action is an unfinished process of critical self-reflexivity that underpins writing/theorising from our lived experiences (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) while ‘understand[ing] how we are situated in moment-to-moment relational positionalities vis-à-vis our cultural and historical identities’ (Lee et al., 2024, p.101). We acknowledge that our journeys and positionalities ⁵ – and by extension, our writing – are not linear, and that we continually navigate these in complex relational networks that change with/in space and time (Assoulin & Bacaller, 2024; Lee et al., 2024). Our writing is thus wary of approaches that seek to cement the Other, as well as those with whom we collaborate (Douglas & Carless, 2014).

In this intra-action of collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing that starts in the middle, we are wary, too, of claiming capital T truths – or supposed ‘common sense’ – within a naturalised masculinist ontology. While we are grateful that collaborative writing can address solo autoethnography’s shortcomings by moving us beyond ideological generalities arising from self-interrogation (Shim, 2018), we also struggle to ‘adequately explain how we collaborate’ because ‘the limit of experience and self-understanding subverts any attempt of descriptive unity and coherence of our writing/collaborative processes’ (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012, p.457). We see this limited knowing as necessary – and productive – to narrativizing through the convolutions of memory, that in principle, animates a lack of cliché (Gale & Wyatt, 2016).

Yet, we also remain w(e)ary that racism – despite its myriad manifestations across different transnational spatiotemporalities – is in many ways, a cliché for racial minorities. Our Asianness is always already tied up with racism, so we ‘mourn our racialized past and present’ and our community’s struggles (Lee et al., 2024, p.98) through intra-active collaborative writing. Consequently, our be(com)ing through (re)writing becomes a space for disruption and possibility (Wyatt & Gale, 2014). Here, we invoke Richardson’s (2000) provocation that ‘no textual staging is ever innocent (including this one) …[since] styles of writing are neither fixed nor neutral but reflect the historically shifting domination of particular schools or paradigms’ (p.5). With our entangled personal-political-professional-philosophical pasts and presents, we seek to transform white colonial norms reified in the ‘status quo of masculinist writing’ (Mackinlay, 2019, p.57).

We contend that our ‘pursuit of race… [sits at] the heart and healing work of qualitative inquiry’ (Farinde-Wu & Butler, 2025, p.635) and see our intra-actions as justice-oriented writing ‘in-community’ (Lee et al., 2024) that productively ‘place[s] the category of individualised subjectivity and the differentiating practice of the individualising subject… under erasure’ (Wyatt & Gale, 2014, p.139). We acknowledge tensions in this entangled communal work as an ex-schoolteacher scholar (Aaron) and practising schoolteacher (Amy) given prevailing ambivalent attitudes to collaborative writing – not just as a practice, but also when such work happens outside academia – because of the demands and constraints of increasingly neoliberal academic collaboration (Gale & Wyatt, 2016). We thus frame our collaboration/writing/collaborative writing as ‘activist research’ (AvR) (Martinez, 2024), that is, cooperation between academics and non-academics that produces knowledge and action for social change. Our writing is an ‘investigation of critical questions that not only impact [our] lives but also [our] onto-epistemological groundings toward emancipation and liberation’ (Farinde-Wu & Butler, 2025, p.636). In what follows, our words story intra-actions that consider how ‘more ephemeral qualities of breath or air… provoke writing otherwise and in relation’ (Gale & Wyatt, 2016, p.362), and importantly, how such writing can embody – through practice and use – ‘acts of activism’ (Madison, 2010).

Intra-Active Collaboration/Writing/Collaborative Writing (Part Two)

Aaron and Amy are both delighted to have discovered this food market. ⁶ Nevertheless, while they are excited at being spoilt for choice with the broad range of pan-Asian food, they cannot help but ponder how such cuisine – and by extension, their ‘Asianness’ – is part of more expansive processes of ‘race’ and racialisation, which underpin the construction of modern nation-states like Australia (Ang, 2021). Standing at the market’s entrance and imagining the different flavours on offer, they remember that, like the ‘exotic’ non-white food on display, their ‘ethnicity becomes spice, [a] seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture’ (hooks, 2014, p.21). Surveying the market’s different sights, they recognise that their race and ethnicity, as an inextricable yet Othered difference, is made hyper-visible so that it can be consumed in an essentialised and commodified manner (Teo, 2023).

Checking that they have enough cash in-hand, they discuss how this Othering manifests in Australia, where the anti-Asian ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse was so central to nation-building that the ‘ideological links between racism, populism and nationalism were sanctioned by the state, for whom racialist nationalism became a central ideological project’ (Ang, 2001, p.102). They note that within this climate where a pervasive white national imaginary endures, there remains a profound ambivalence in Asian racialisation (Ang, 2001), where being Asian has been paradoxically conceived as threat to, and opportunity for, the nation. Aaron highlights that as threat, Asians represent potential disease/invasion/overpopulation, an ever-present threat to national security, labour markets, and economy. Amy observes that as opportunity, Asia is positioned through economic logics as Australia’s destiny in trade and regional leadership; Asians as educated, hard-working Others who bring untapped sources of financial, human, and cultural capital necessary for white national advancement. Aaron agrees that this ‘opportunity/threat dichotomy’ (Ang, 2016) sums up the deep-seated ambivalence of Asian racialisation in Australia well.

Starting to meander through the market, they feel the combined heat emanating from the charcoal food grills and throngs of other bodies. They are grateful for the cool spring air on their faces, prompting Amy to remark about how air is taken for granted because it is all around, and a fundamental – yet unseen – part of inhabited bodily spaces (Apata, 2020). Aaron nods in agreement, adding that it is barely noticeable, or rather, noticeable only when in short supply or polluted. He adds that air – through breathing – is not only the basis of life, but synonymous with life itself. He then reflects that ‘air not only represents freedom but is also the embodiment of freedom – not freedom from something but freedom to be, to live: freedom as life itself, while its negation is suffocation’ (Apata, 2020, p.243).

Continuing to wander, Amy ponders further about air and wonders aloud about similarities between racism and breathing. She notes that like air, racism is ubiquitous yet concealed; its unseen but violent nature constricting freedom, movement and sometimes, life itself (Apata, 2020). Aaron draws comparisons to the North American #BlackLivesMatter protests and ongoing Indigenous Australian deaths in custody, before directing Amy to Spivak’s work on the subaltern. He explains that Spivak’s question about whether the subaltern can speak revolves around suffocation in which the subaltern’s voice, like breathing itself, has been smothered and silenced, since breath and voice are akin. Aaron further explains that speech – and voice – is pushed out by the breath of air, while ‘ideas and thoughts come…as a function analogous to inhalation… [Therefore,] to think, to conceive or to be inspired is to inhale, while to speak, to express either through speech or song, is to exhale’ (Apata, 2020, p.245). He agrees with Amy that racism not only causes tangible physical harm, but also suffocates – curtails, suppresses and sometimes, even kills – freedom to move, speak, and think beyond normalised racial domination.

Amy shares how she’s recently started reading Sarah Ahmed’s work. She shares Ahmed’s (2004) poignant reminder about Othering that occurs when non-white bodies are in white spaces, and the accompanying sense of not feeling quite at home along with the ‘pressure’ the racialised body feels. Aaron playfully commends Amy for proving herself as an English teacher in extending the air metaphor so robustly, before commenting that pressure and suffocation have become both a characteristic feature, and weapon of, contemporary racial injustice (Apata, 2020).

Stopping to peruse a menu, they debate what they’d like to try, and why. The conversation transitions to how visiting a food market freely like this, in its current splendour, would have been impossible during COVID-19. Aaron laments being unable to do more for Asian restaurateurs suffocated out of business during COVID due to anti-Asian sentiment. He remarks that, like COVID-19, racism functions like a constantly mutating invisible virus that’s always ahead; a chilling wind where only its victims, not perpetrators, feel its bitter, piercing effects (Apata, 2020). He ruminates on how racism is a pandemic of its own (Teo), constantly adapting to changing contexts and how, similarly, race – and ‘Asian’ as a racial category – is not individually innate or environmentally intrinsic but rather, shaped by dominant knowledge systems within specific times and places. He ruminates further on how ‘Australian racism generally is far less overt and direct, and far less easy to delineate’ (Hage, 2014, p.234), and how for Asian Australians, the added complexity of unique racialisation presents significant challenges in ‘prov[ing] any “hard” racism here while still feeling objectified, subjected to scrutiny, othered’ (Ang, 2001, p.144).

Amy quickly interjects that she has only recently come to recognise racism’s social-cultural-historical-political situatedness and that it ‘circulates in Australia... in different forms with different intensities’ (Hage, 2014, p.232). She bemoans with deep concern too, that none of the lessons learnt during her own education engaged race as a construct that we are simultaneously entangled and constituted in, and the flow-on effects this had on understanding her own ‘Asianness’. She laments Australia’s silence on race and ponders how best to find her voice to speak back against racism embedded across individual experiences, broader communities, and the school in which she teaches. She laments not having done more during the bus incident, wishing she had more in her pedagogical toolkit when confronting anti-Asian racism. She further remarks on the uneasy relationship between Asian migrant settlers and First Nations peoples which are routinely mediated – or rather, obscured – by binary colonial white/black logics (Assoulin & Bacaller, 2024).

Aaron sighs empathetically, acknowledging how Asian Australian ‘cultural biographies corralled into binary arrangements of identity are only acknowledged by reference to their relative privileged positionality in, or to, whiteness’ (Assoulin & Bacaller, 2024, p.3), resulting in a ‘prison house of identity’ (Ang, 2001, p.11). He highlights that it was only through a protracted ‘coming to theory’ (hooks, 1991) via his PhD that his lungs were filled with air to retort binarizing cultures of racialised domination (hooks, 1994). He encourages Amy that these intra-actions they are having are in themselves productive, since they are always already involved in deconstructing white domination based on race/ethnicity/nationality/immigration status/gender, particularly during the resurgence of COVID-19 anti-Asian hate (Lee et al., 2024; Teo).

Aaron hastily places his food order and reminds Amy that such conversations shift them beyond static racialised identities, capturing instead – like air – an ever-present porous entanglement between ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia’, an ‘in-betweenness [that] is embedded and emerging in everyday lives wherever [they] are’ (Lee et al., 2024, p.97). He muses on how air circulates and swirls vis-à-vis their temporal positionings that are always formed relationally with their surroundings, ongoing interactions, and an ever-changing atmosphere reshaping who they are (Lee et al., 2024). ⁷ He further muses that this vibrancy (Gale & Wyatt, 2016) of racial/transnational/generational relationality flows with/in its own process of movements, encompassing temporal, spatial, and relational aspects of being and becoming (Lee et al., 2024) that move beyond recognitional fallacies of fixed racialised binaries (Ross & Li, 2024). He then encourages Amy to continue moving in open and intersubjective ways that foreground relationship, openness, and dialogue, and allow for mutual change through the effort of moving toward something more just (Ross & Li, 2024). He also reminds Amy that such relational dialogue necessarily centres a complex and ethical ‘deep listening’ (Assoulin & Bacaller, 2024).

Amy chews on Aaron’s words, taking slightly longer to decide and finalise her order. She takes a deep breath and presses Aaron about how such relationality, openness, and listening might avoid insularity and ineffectuality, especially given the continuities of rife (anti-Asian) racism. Aaron puffs out as Amy collects her change, drawing her attention to the power of writing for change, and of collaborative interventions where only words can do (Gale & Wyatt, 2025). He quizzes her about what changed when she first encountered his stories about experiencing racism. She confesses that ‘she sensed her body had, at least in part, been infected by the words she had just read. [To her, it felt like more than something] to do with her thinking self. She [knew of] people frequently and somewhat casually using the word “visceral” to describe these feelings… [However, in that moment,] it felt more like an energy, something being shared; an agentic atmospheric force’ (Gale & Wyatt, 2025, p.74).

Aaron appreciates the cool atmospheric spring air aloud and shares a similar sensation of ongoing change in (re)encountering Amy’s writing about the bus. He shares how each (re)reading for him involves tripping over and standing together, departing and returning, losing and finding (Gale & Wyatt, 2016), and acknowledges that in this sense, intra-active collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing necessarily engages unfolding changes in the ‘self’ with/in processes of constant flux and change. He elaborates that simultaneously, each (re)reading of Amy’s bus incident was a (re)encounter with the violence of race and the ghost and hauntings of the Other – negatively racialised ‘minor… people who are somewhere else, people that in their constant becoming are always missing’ (p.358).

As they watch the stallholder stir-fry the seemingly disparate menagerie of ingredients in a wok, Amy comments on how she loves the complex charred aroma and smoky flavour characteristic of many Asian dishes. She shares how, alongside Ahmed’s work, she’s also recently been fascinated by how this scent and taste profile is imparted through the ‘breath of a wok’ or wok hei, which is ‘part science, part art, part magic’ (Michelin Guide, 2016; para.2) involving the ‘caramelisation of sugars, maillard reactions, and smoking of oil’ (para.6). Amy wonders aloud if this is a fitting metaphor for collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing since it embodies processes of becoming that are always already entangled with transnational racial/familial/cultural histories and Others that are missing, or not immediately obvious. As someone with strong Cantonese roots on his fraternal grandmother’s side, Aaron smiles at this comparison. He agrees with Amy, highlighting that as a cornerstone of the Asian (cooking) experience, wok hei, like collaborative writing, occurs under intense levels of (racist) heat through the tossing and intra-action of air, heat, and constituent ingredients/selves in the process.

Aaron adds that as a pan-Asian cooking technique using a wok burner that has little in terms of precise temperature control, wok hei simultaneously defies exact replicability and boundedness to a static, one-dimensional ‘Asian’ identity. Enamoured with the metaphor, Amy offers that collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing inherently addresses the missing Other by shifting away from the dominant norm of ‘lone rangers of expertise’ and ‘isolationist and exclusionary ways of knowing’ that exclude marginalised peoples as knowledge makers (Wyatt & Gale, 2014, p.295). She further offers that, like wok hei cooking, collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing encourages gathering and weaving disparate, fragmented ingredients/selves into a cohesive dish/narrative that is done ‘on our own terms for our ongoing versions of ourselves and for our yet-to-be-discovered selves (Lee et al., 2024, p.100)’. ⁸

As the wok continues tossing, Aaron smiles again, agreeing that collaborative compositions avoid political closure and philosophical ennui (MacLure, 2010) by repudiating isolated, linear one-dimensional approaches. He expresses gratitude that such compositions advocate instead for interwoven lived experiences, marginalised voices, and intertwining themes in writing/theorising beyond the status quo (Lee et al., 2024). He then reminds Amy that collaborative compositions enable a concurrent sense of ‘remaining within’ the heterogenous contingencies, flux, and intra-actions in an always-emerging relationality (Gale & Wyatt, 2016), while also embodying potentialities that contest, disrupt, and ar/wrest possibilities in the academy and beyond (Wyatt & Gale, 2014). ⁹

Amy holds back a sneeze as a whiff of the airborne spice from the caramelising chilli paste catches her nose. Aaron giggles, teasing Amy about her spice tolerance, or lack thereof. Amy confesses that it’s one part of Asian cuisine that she’s still learning about, and coming to terms with, likening it to where she stands with collaborative writing. She confesses that as an English teacher, she often feels ‘trapped in the linear syntax and propositional logic of the English language’ (MacLure, 2010, p.281), and consequently, feels a deepened, albeit thoroughly partial understanding of the topic (Richardson, 2003). Aaron acknowledges Amy’s frustrations, pointing out that ‘writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and [going] beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience’ (Deleuze et al., 1997, p.1), an act that he finds paradoxically allows him to ‘know more and doubt what [he] know[s]..[and where,] ingeniously, [he] know[s] there is always more to know’ (Richardson, 2003, p.934). He acknowledges, too, the impossibility of leaping past language, but encourages Amy to continue to reach for that which evades and transcends language through writing (MacLure, 2010).

As Amy teeters the in-between of sniffling and sneezing, Aaron reminds her that importantly, collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing resists binarizing biases (Gale & Wyatt, 2016) and categorical thinking (Lee et al., 2024) by simultaneously interrogating and activating, ‘a form of radicalism and subversion that has the potential to problematize the inegalitarian divisiveness and inherent conservatism of thinking and practice’ (Wyatt & Gale, 2014, p.296). He reminds her that, with/in the context of anti-Asian racism, collaboratively interweaving the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ in writing resists normative identity politics, and acts as collective momentum and transformative possibility via decolonial, anti-racist qualitative inquiry (Lee et al., 2024). He further likens collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing to pushing back (racialised) forgetfulness (Gale & Wyatt, 2025) and ‘open[ing] new possibilities for thinking and doing’ (MacLure, 2010, p.277) that engage in anti-racist ways with the diversity of ‘public, social and intimate worlds that have capacity to affect and be affected’ (Mackinlay, 2019, p.6). He reminds Amy, too, that in contrast to their earlier discussion about suffocation and dying, writing leaves no space for death. Instead, it creates room for the productive forces of life, love, and all their in-between possibilities, where movements turn into moments and moments into movements (Gale & Wyatt, 2025).

The wok fires again and the enticing aroma of Amy’s order immediately permeates their nostrils, prompting Amy to recount moments that both precede – and succeed – the bus incident. Such moments include being afraid of heating up her ‘ethnic’ food in white-dominant communal spaces, aligning herself with white colonial beauty standards, not seeing herself in school curriculum or resources, and not being taught by teachers that looked like her (Eizadirad, 2024). Aaron responds with some moments, too, including emphasising his Western-sounding first name over his Chinese middle name to ensure access to opportunity (Teo, 2024), of being implicated – by virtue of his skin colour – with the cause, spread, and (violent) consequences of COVID, and of the self-hate stemming from being marginalised, accompanied by a desire to be more white (Eizadirad, 2024; Teo & Chew, 2025).

Aaron marvels at the stallholder’s quick movements in portioning and packing their orders, prompting him to reflect on the way that such moments matter for broader movements against anti-Asian racism. He shares with Amy that collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing as one such movement necessarily uses personal narratives to convey that ‘there is responsibility as researchers[, students, and colleagues] to handle [information about their experiences] with care… to not dismiss [their] truths… [but instead] listen through all [the] senses’ (Eizadirad, 2024, p.309)’. He further shares that such work should provoke a breathing in that takes stock of the pervasive yet nebulous ways masculinist white settler colonial supremacy and racism operate, and a breathing out that foregrounds First Nations sovereignty to resist broader racial inequity. As they excitedly collect their food, Aaron adds that such work necessarily invokes inhaling in in moments of discomfort, exhaling when speaking up in solidarity, and following the rise and fall of minoritised chests’ as they carve out breathing space amidst the permanence of racism (Madriaga & Blaisdell, 2024).

Breathing in and out Towards an Ending

As we (re)consider the intra-active moments and movements of air/woks/breaths/cultures/markets/buses/bodies/ingredients/histories, we continue to breathe in, aware that chronological time in our collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing dissolves vis-à-vis the immediacy of living in the ‘present’ ¹⁰ (Gale & Wyatt, 2025). We continue to breathe out, aware that any sort of ending can only come when the body breathes no more, and that even when that happens, our words and worlds will continue to whirl and swirl (Gale & Wyatt, 2025). Of course, we are also aware that like air, our collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing is like vapour ‘being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements… [where] we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable’ (Lyotard, 1984, p.xxiv). Channelling Barthes (1977) we see ‘writing [as] the destruction of every…point of origin’ (p.142) and what we present here as a mere ‘tissue of quotations’ (p.146).

Nevertheless, as is often the case with air, we suggest that we are better served with interrogating its meaning and effects ‘not in its origin but in its destination’ (Barthes, 1977, p.148), and to pursue an alluring and enchanting – yet always incomplete – ‘something’ that drives our collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing forward (Gale & Wyatt, 2016). Accordingly, what we present here – much like air and vapour – is always inextricably tethered – through ‘sustained entanglement and interference’ – with an ‘intransigent specificity and perplexing otherness’ (MacLure, 2010, p.281). Our stories thus reveal this entangled otherness and/with the Other ‘through open dialogue… experienced holistically and viscerally in specific moments’ (Ross & Li, 2024, p.8), while also embodying ‘our aspirations to share a voice which is both melodic and harmonious yet retains difference’ (Douglas & Carless, 2014, p.303). To do so, we identify our ‘own’ ambiguous and complex subjectivities aligned with a moral imperative to the selfhood of Others – one that reflects these complexities ‘in a manner that prioritizes an ethic of respect, recognition and enigma, rather than a politics of demarcation, reduction and closure’ (Assoulin & Bacaller, 2024, p.5). For us, this act of identification is an intentional assertion of restor(y)ing and ‘embracing our scattered selves’ (Lee et al., 2024, p.100), while also strategically including ourselves in communities of solidarity against negatively racialised Others. It is also a tactical instrumentalization to breathe freely in a context where we must constantly bend ‘our energy towards inconvenient resistance to the hegemony of reiterated [racialised] simplifications’ (Assoulin & Bacaller, 2024, p.17).

Our collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing seeks to interrogate oft-un(der)explored flows, margins, and uncertainties (Lee et al., 2024). As such, we necessarily position our stories with a ‘force/full/ness [that is] much more than two people writing with/to/about each other’ (Gale & Wyatt, 2025, p.75), seeking an iterative development of self in/with/through Others (Ross & Li, 2024). In so doing, we see our collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing as a political, response-able site where we ‘critique reality, identity, language, and [the] dominant culture’s representation and ideological control’ that normatively defines our identities and positionalities (Lee et al., 2024, p.98). We see our work as a form of qualitative inquiry that cannot be entangled from the ethics of truth-telling and social justice (Kuntz, 2021) and suggest that such collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing helps us ‘remain conscious, reflective and appropriately uncomfortable in our positioning in Indigenous spaces and places’ (Assoulin & Bacaller, 2024, p.17).

Importantly, as we breathe in and out, we are hopeful that such collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing might (help us) become what we were not before. We wish to continue questioning how this work might continue – and what other middles this work might entangle with – ‘by always working with each new conceptualization of collaborative writing as an event and, through our continuing engagement with these practices… offering a theorizing of collaborative writing that is always open, fluid, creative’ (Gale & Wyatt, 2016, p.362). Indeed, lest we collude ‘with the work of audit by suppressing idiom, diversity and risk’ (MacLure, 2010, p.280), we hope that the intra-action of our collaborating/writing/collaboratively writing continues to embody and reflect the fluidity and freedom of air and breath.