Intimate Scholarship: Knowledge-Making as a Deeply Situated and Relational Practice

This chapter brings intimate scholarship into entangled conversation with post-qualitative inquiry, tracing how scholars might compose research differently when intimacy is not merely human, but affective, material, and more-than-human. Moving beyond humanist traditions that centre the autonomous subject, I explore how intimate scholarship, when reconfigured through a post-qualitative lens, can be enacted as a performative, ontologically situated mode of inquiry that folds together sensing, feeling, remembering, and materialising in research. These provocations open up possibilities for reconceptualising movement, sport, health, and physical education as lively assemblages through which research is lived, felt, and co-composed. The chapter invites readers to dwell in the messiness of relational ethics and indeterminate knowing, proposing intimate scholarship as a diffractive practice of response-ability, attunement, and emergent inquiry.