Becoming Together in Research Practices

In this contribution, we wish to discuss how methods are produced in the inextricable connection between researcher and research practices. We assume that research methods imply total immersion for the researcher in the research practices, and we discuss two aspects: how researchers perform this immersion through the alliance with human and nonhuman actors in research practice and the overcoming of method as an exogenous component. In the first research practice, in a cellular and molecular biology laboratory, the ethnographer (who is not an expert in the practice) engages the laboratory experts in the experiment of creating self-narratives in which they narrate their complex and sociomaterial learning process of research practice. In the second one, conducting interviews ‘around’ and ‘with’ objects, medical devices for the management and treatment of diabetes become relational objects that allow the co-construction of a common knowledge about that situated practice. The paper offers two examples of the becoming together, that is, an extension of the ‘becoming-with’ notion by Donna Haraway.