I’m happy to share that I will be contributing a chapter to Phillip Vannini’s forthcoming The Routledge International Handbook of Organic, Slow, and AI-Free Research (Routledge). The handbook brings together methodological contributions that respond to a rapidly consolidating divide in the social sciences: AI-enhanced research on one side, and AI-free research on the other. Rather than offering only critique, the volume builds a shared language and a set of practical alternatives for research grounded in time, craft, relationality, and human intentionality.
My chapter—“Misprinted Methods: Zines, Micromanuals, and the Slow Craft of Ethnographic Inquiry”—approaches zine-making and other low-tech print experiments as an offstage field kit for doing slow, organic research in a time of AI-accelerated scholarship. Drawing on my multimodal ethnographic practice, I reflect on a series of printed devices I use to think with the field rather than about it: small manuals, fold-outs, diagrammatic cards, and misprinted prototypes produced through time-intensive processes of walking, collecting, drawing, layout, and printing.
A key argument of the chapter is that imperfection can be methodological. Misregistration, smudges, and textual glitches are not simply production defects; they are traces of situated attention, fatigue, and material resistance—evidence that research is made with bodies, tools, and environments. In this sense, craft becomes a way of refusing automation and standardization without turning AI refusal into purity politics.
The chapter is structured as an illustrated essay and includes both conceptual tools and concrete exercises for readers interested in cultivating AI-free research ecologies. The point is not simply to “avoid AI,” but to make scholarship that is more flavorful, more accountable, and more alive to its own conditions of making—research whose textures were not generated in seconds, and whose imperfections reflect the time, care, and relations through which it was made.
I’m grateful for the invitation and excited to develop this work in dialogue with the other contributors.