Editorial: Tools for research (and to predetermine) the world

Pushing authors to make themselves visible in the text ‒ through autoethnography ‒ to account for the decisions that drive their em­pirical research work, explain the performative relationships that link them to their tools, and show the process of cyclical adaptations between them, their tools and the world, guest editors Donato Ricci and Jamie Allen challenged the traditional canons of academic publishing, more focused on displaying results and describing processes than on ques­tioning the means we use to research, test, and validate. These autoethnographic stories ‒ provoc­ative, experimental, and introspective ‒ make us aware of the relationship that we establish with our research tools. Along with this, they urge us to redefine research and publication practices and to question the boundaries between dualistic catego­ries like subject/object, truth/fiction, writer/reader, user/producer, culture/nature and collaboration/ competition, calling for correspondence, inclusion, care, fiction, political soundness, collaboration, post-production, readiness to be affected, pro­to-politics, and the relational dimension of data.