Decolonial and New Materialist Research: Knowing-in-Being in Collective Biography

Decolonial and New Materialist Research offers a profound reconfiguration of qualitative research through a decolonial, feminist new materialist lens grounded in Collective Biography. Centred on a creative-relational research project with Indian women living and working within Western academic institutions, the book develops an embodied, non-extractive research praxis that refuses linearity, representational capture, and colonial epistemic frames. Drawing on agential realism, De/Colonial ethics of refusal, feminist new materialist theories, and choreographic practice, Manjunath articulates knowing-in-being as an entangled ethico-onto-epistemic orientation. The book positions research as emergent, relational, embodied worlding rather than the production of findings. Through diffractive writing, poetic fragments, and processual narrative, it traces the methodological tensions, vulnerabilities, and ethical encounters that shape collaborative inquiry across cultures, power imbalances, and institutional constraints. Bringing together creative method, practice-led inquiry, and critical decolonial theory, Decolonial and New Materialist Research contributes a rare Global South feminist perspective to post-qualitative methodology. It will be of value to researchers and postgraduate students working in qualitative methods, arts-based inquiry, counselling and psychotherapy, feminist and decolonial studies, and practice-led research across the social sciences and humanities.