Editor’s Introduction

I find myself in a contemplative space as I write this introduction, sitting with questions about how interiority and beingness shape inquiry. Not interiority as a methodological tool to be deployed, nor beingness as a static positionality to be declared and archived. Rather, I am contemplating interiority as terrain: vast, multilayered, inhabited by ancestors and wounds and longings, textured with sensation and spirit, functioning as the very ground from which knowledge emerges. This contemplation moves beyond critical reflexivity as a checkpoint in the research process. It invites us to consider how relationality, affective reactions, insight building, and trusting our own ontoepistemological fluency become the pathways through which we navigate interior landscapes. Becoming more fully ourselves through deep excavation allows a kind of departure that becomes expansive and intentional, building a terrain brimming with possibilities for how we engage in qualitative inquiry.The scholars in this issue extend invitations into interiority: not as a retreat from the world, but as the relational space where ethical, accountable, transformative research becomes possible. They ask us to contemplate what interiority contains, how it functions, what textures it carries, and what topographies emerge when we attend to it with sustained care. Collectively, these works challenge Western academia’s demand that we fragment ourselves, sanitize our knowing, and leave our spirits at the door. Instead, they argue that bringing our whole selves (body, spirit, ancestors, longings, wounds, and belonging) into research spaces is not optional. It is the very condition of knowledge production that honors the communities with whom we engage and the methodological departures we seek to make.These pieces do not offer formulas or procedures. They offer contemplations. They slow us down. They ask us to notice what we carry inside, to attend to what our bodies know before our minds can articulate it, to honor the ancestors who shape our ways of seeing, to sit with the fog that never fully lifts. In doing so, they reveal interiority as epistemology and ontology: how we know and how we be, inseparable from one another, inseparable from the relationships that constitute us.Melba Marin-Velasquez’s piece, “A Flight of Imagination Into Temazcal Relationality: A Journey Into Research as a More Relational Process With Community Knowledge Co-Creators,” opens this issue by inviting us into sacred space. Drawing on Anzaldúa’s concept of flights of imagination, Marin-Velasquez theorizes the temazcal (a healing sweat lodge) as a metaphor and method for understanding relationality in research with Indigenous communities. Her work demonstrates that interiority functions as portal. The flight of imagination is not escapism but a journey inward that connects us to ancestors, to place, to other-than-human relatives, and to the researchers and community members with whom we co-create knowledge. Marin-Velasquez shows us that to enter into true relationality requires bringing our full selves (our mestiza fragmentation, our ancestral memories, our spiritual knowing) into the research encounter. The temazcal becomes the womb-like space where transformation occurs through vulnerability, ceremony, and the willingness to be dis-membered and re-membered. Her piece establishes interiority not as private introspection but as fundamentally relational. The interior work of attending to one’s own wounds, privileges, and spiritual inheritances is what makes it possible to show up accountably in community spaces. By centering Indigenous epistemologies of relationality and spirituality, Marin-Velasquez challenges extractive Western research paradigms and demonstrates that knowledge production begins when we honor the spirits that inhabit space, place, and our own bodies.Keondria McClish-Boyd’s article, “The Role of Reflexivity in Endarkened Narrative Inquiry,” invites us to contemplate the textures of interiority: the sensations, cycles, and embodied knowing that arise when we attend deeply to the research process. McClish-Boyd extends reflexivity beyond positionality statements to encompass embodied, relational, and spiritual dimensions. Through vignettes from her research with Black women, she reveals how interiority has sensation: the sweat on her back, the tightening in her chest, the physical manifestation of privilege and power dynamics in the research encounter. Her reflexive cycle (awareness, relational engagement, spiritual and cultural integration, critical examination, knowledge transformation, and documentation and integration) maps interiority as iterative terrain that researchers must return to again and again. This is not a linear process to be completed but a cyclical practice of noticing what the body knows, what ancestors whisper, what wounds demand attention. McClish-Boyd demonstrates that interiority is not neutral territory. It is inhabited by the oppressor/oppressed binaries we carry, the privileges we embody, the cultural knowledges we have been taught to suppress. Endarkened narrative inquiry, grounded in Black feminist epistemology and womanism, refuses to treat these interior complexities as bias to be managed. Instead, it positions them as essential knowledge: the very substance from which accountable, justice-oriented research emerges. By emphasizing researcher well-being and the ethical necessity of caring for ourselves in the process, McClish-Boyd challenges the harmful myth that ethical research means only protecting participants while researchers absorb trauma and deplete themselves. She shows us that attending to interiority with sustained care is what allows us to remain present, accountable, and capable of the relational work that qualitative inquiry demands.Scarlett L. Hester’s autoethnography, “Fog, Connection, and Network: Korean American Adoptee Community and the Digital Diaspora,” maps the topography of interiority for those whose belonging has been fractured across borders, languages, and imposed identities. Hester theorizes “coming out of the fog” as the never-ending process of reckoning with adoptee identity: a journey through interior terrain marked by disorientation, longing, and the search for homeland in spaces that were never designed to hold us. Her piece reveals interiority as landscape: the fog that never fully lifts, the borderlands of not-quite-Korean and not-quite-American, the digital dimensions where connection becomes possible across geographic distance. Through her experience in a virtual Korean American adoptee reading group, Hester demonstrates that interiority creates the conditions for recognizing one another: for seeing faces that look like ours paired with names that signal displacement, for speaking without explanation, for belonging in the both-and rather than the either-or. She reimagines borders not as sites of exclusion but as networks of connection, and homeland not as geographic location but as the digital diaspora where adoptees find each other. Her work shows us that interiority is not solitary. The interior work of confronting fragmentation, mourning loss, and refusing assimilation is what allows Korean American adoptees to create sacred community spaces: spaces that are purposefully exclusionary to protect the vulnerability and wholeness that become possible when we no longer have to perform for those who do not understand. Hester’s autoethnographic method centers adoptee voices that have been systematically silenced, and in doing so, she demonstrates that contemplating our own interiority is a political act: one that challenges the adoption industrial complex, white supremacy, and the lie that belonging must be tied to nation-state citizenship.Together, these scholars invite us to contemplate interiority as the ground of ethical, relational, transformative qualitative research. They show us that interiority functions as portal (Marin-Velasquez), has texture and sensation (McClish-Boyd), and reveals topographies of belonging and displacement (Hester). They demonstrate that knowledge production begins not with observation of the world “out there” but with deep attention to the worlds we carry within. This attention is not navel-gazing. It is the practice of becoming accountable to ancestors, to community, to the spirits that inhabit place, and to our own fragmented and whole selves. It is the work of refusing the lies we have been taught to tell about objectivity, neutrality, and distance. It is the commitment to showing up in research spaces with our bodies, our wounds, our longings, and our spirits intact.As you engage with the pieces in this issue, I invite you to sit with your own interiority. What terrain do you carry? What ancestors inhabit your interior landscapes? What wounds have you been taught to hide in the name of rigor? What would it mean to bring your whole self (not just your intellect, not just your credentials, but your spirit, your body, your longing for justice) into your research practice? And perhaps most provocatively: What knowledge becomes possible only when we stop fragmenting ourselves?