The editors set out what the book seeks to trouble and what we are troubled by when speaking about feminist methodologies. We highlight the commonalities and differences across the book showcasing the many methodologies feminism has inspired and shaped. We delve into the patterns we saw woven across the chapters and the major themes that emerge in the book. We reflect on what we learned, what surprised, and what delighted us, as well as the ways in which the creative tensions and the inevitable silences invited us to reflect on what we could not do, the queer art of failure that is also part of our feminist method.

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This running theme’s introduction rethinks fieldwork as an ongoing process. It explores experiences and conceptions of ‘becoming fluent in fieldwork’: the contextual processes through which we do, learn, and unlearn practices of fieldwork. It sees fieldwork as a collective project. Recognising the entanglement of field sites and travelling with fields to certain other fields, we become multiply entangled, and thus we ask: what do these plural relations demand from us? We turn to the concept and praxis of love as it considers the responsibility, care work and thinking-working together that is needed to respect other people’s realities together with them. We foreground the notion of ‘becoming fluent’ that reflects fieldwork as a work in process, and emphasises the processual aspects of fieldwork: the journey that spans the time before, during and after the fieldwork. This process involves engaging meaningfully with relations, relationality and collaboration, ‘ongoingness’ and ethics in motion.

Our chapter builds upon feminist understandings of the more-than-human, using our experiences of working with peasant farmers involved in seed saving (Leila) and activists’ relation to individual environmental practices (Karijn). Through a dialogue around our experiences, we reflect on feelings of discomfort, and how, rather than resolving our anxieties, discomfort has the potential to open up conventional ways of being a researcher. Focusing on relationality through embodied and processual research challenges the notion of method as a tool used by a disembodied researcher observing an inert or external world, a central concern of feminist-oriented research. We show how participating in plural and more-than-human worlds also challenges multiple binary positionings and allows for unwarranted surprises that might undo the assumptions and categories underpinning our research.

The process of engaging with and learning from each other that culminated in this book has been a beautiful experiment in community building. We are grateful for the time and care that each contributor has put into this—beginning with shared laughter and good food in an idyllic setting in Bolsena, Italy, and continuing with the unhurried reading of and commenting on each other’s draft chapters. By way of bringing the collection to a close, we, the editors, offer a few reflections on how to do feminist research. We open up questions around: what it means to trouble and be troubled by; how to learn and unlearn together; and in what ways our methodologies take us beyond academic knowledge production.