When Everything Becomes Data: Researcherly Perception, Writing-With, and the Ethics of Methodological Attention

This paper examines the familiar claim that researchers “see everything as data” as a methodological and ethical problem. We argue that researcherly becoming involves a data-sensitive gaze: a trained way of noticing how ordinary moments become analytically meaningful. Yet such seeing can become extractive when lived relations are too quickly converted into research material. To address this tension, we propose Writing-With as a methodological stance for understanding data-becoming through four keys: relational, reflexive, recursive, and re-forming. The paper shifts attention from what counts as data to how, whether, and with whom something becomes data.