The promise of dwelling – Affective encounters with ‘not yet’ data

Research on affective encounters is necessarily embodied and entangled with elusive, often affect-drenched data. In this paper, we show how our study of Zagreb’s Museum of Broken Relationships benefited from methodological innovations in organisational studies involving affective ethnography and ‘not-yet’ data. Drawing on the theorising of Martin Heidegger, we also reflect on our attempts to dwell in elusive, more-than-representational data through the use of multimodal arts-based methods: writing with resonance, poetry and illustration. We suggest that our poetic dwelling illuminated and helped materialise the immaterial, fostering an affective form of sensemaking concerning the spatial, temporal and material intensities of affective encounters. We reflect on the promise of dwelling in data for analysing differently, knowing differently, and researching differently within and beyond highly-charged atmospheres such as our context.