Research rivers: Flows of agency through crisis

From early 2020, as the spread of COVID-19 and related restrictions intersected with everyday lives and, inevitably, social research practices, the ability to act and continue research was a significant concern in the social research community. In a project aimed at supporting methodological responses to the pandemic context the authors ran a series of online knowledge exchange workshops. The invitation to participate suggested researchers convey recent times of their research experiences by drawing and presenting a river sketch. The paper critically engages with the research rivers by creating a new interference pattern of a new materialist approach combined with experiences and project artefacts. The compatibility of new materialism and qualitative inquiry is discussed. Through an analysis focussed on two of the rivers, the ways the research river activity entangled matter and meaning is examined and the paper shows how a new materialist understanding of exclusion transforms the ethical dimensions of researchers’ methodological decisions. We conclude that research rivers produce particular forms of retrospective agency that highlighted affect throughout the pandemic and reframes the ethics for choosing and developing methods along an axis of inclusion and exclusion.