Cadent Inquiry

Cadent Inquiry is developed from within crip, Mad, and neurodivergent traditions of organizing time, space, and relation, rather than translated into them. It does not orient toward normative aspiration, improvement, or optimization.

Instead, it orients toward livability, relational accountability, and sustained possibility. Disabled bodies are not welcomed into a pre-existing methodological frame. The frame itself is shaped from CripMadNeuroqueer elsewheres and otherwises, such that access, pacing, and relational responsibility are foundational rather than responsive.

Cadent Inquiry enacts a crip orientation to time within qualitative group inquiry. Rather than accelerating engagement to meet institutional expectations of productivity, clarity, or outcome, it intervenes by re-patterning tempo, pacing, duration, persistence, and return as integral to the inquiry itself.

Cadence here shapes what can be encountered, stayed with, deferred, revisited, or refused. Inquiry unfolds through rhythm rather than timeline, allowing meaning to emerge through cycles of engagement, pause, friction, and return rather than through linear accumulation or disclosure.

Cadent Inquiry is organized around revisitable engagement within a deliberately structured gathering space. This structure is grounded in shared agreements, facilitation practices, and relational responsibilities that make collective inquiry possible.

These agreements do not impose uniform pace or developmental sequence. Instead, they establish a shared orientation toward care, attentiveness, and mutual obligation, while also naming clear pathways for engaging disagreement, conflict, and ethical tension.

Within this structure, divergent and non-synchronous temporal cadences can be held in relation to one another over time. Cadence is neither chaotic nor homogenizing. It is relational, allowing difference to move toward moments of confluence without requiring sameness, compliance, or erasure.

The conditions that support Cadent Inquiry are not assumed or guaranteed. They require careful cultivation and ongoing maintenance.

Facilitation within this methodology is attentive and skilled, involving continuous judgment about when to hold, when to invite, when to pause, and when to allow movement without commentary. Participants may arrive, linger, withdraw, return, persist, or remain partially engaged across sessions. These movements are understood not simply as individual preferences, but as relational expressions situated within distinct embodymindments engaged with a live living universe (Wilson, 2021).

Such movements are treated as meaningful orientations within a shared relational field, rather than as disruptions to be managed.

Within Cadent Inquiry, meaning, value, and ethical tension are not treated as elements to be resolved or extracted. While moments of clarity may arise, these relations are understood as beings encountered through practice rather than objects of analysis.

They may be revisited under different conditions across time (Gaudet, 2019), without presumption of mastery or closure. Knowledge remains provisional and iterative, emerging through relational density rather than consensus or completion (Freire, 2018, 1970). Contradiction, ambivalence, and partial articulation are not failures of analysis, but signals of complexity that can be held without foreclosure (Davis, 2021, 1974).

Materials, shared activity, and relational pacing are treated as constitutive practices of inquiry, inseparable from the craft of the work itself. Inquiry is shaped not only by what is made, but by how a group is able to enter, sustain, and return to relation with particular materials over time.

Relational pacing is not a fixed tempo or a generalized ethic of slowness. It is an ongoing calibration between the demands of a medium and the shifting capacities of a group, including uneven distributions of skill, different relationships to risk and uncertainty, and varying thresholds for attention, frustration, and repair. The same material practice may therefore require markedly different cadential arrangements depending on who is gathered and how they are oriented toward the work.

Cadent Inquiry actively welcomes aesthetic aspiration. Participants may arrive with deep training, strong technical commitments, and serious artistic ambitions, or with no prior identification as artists at all. Aspiration is not treated as a problem to be managed or a value to be flattened. Instead, it is invited into relation, where it can coexist with care, access, and shared livability.

Technique, repetition, and patience function as anchors for inquiry, not as measures of competence or attainment, but as practices that steady attention, sustain relation, and make staying possible. Skill is neither a prerequisite for participation nor a terminal endpoint that governs the group’s tempo or value. Aesthetic seriousness may deepen the work, but it does not determine who belongs, how fast the room moves, or what counts as meaningful engagement.

Within this orientation, materials are not passive tools but active participants in the inquiry. Their resistances, constraints, and affordances shape how people move, pause, risk, and return. Conversation, silence, gesture, and material presence unfold alongside one another, allowing multiple modes of sense-making to coexist without privileging virtuosity, verbal fluency, narrative coherence, speed, or immediacy.

Within Cadent Inquiry, consent is a methodological enactment understood as ongoing, situational, and on a spectrum (Thom, 2022). Consent is inseparable from the possibility of dissent. Where dissent is unwelcome, consent cannot meaningfully exist. Participation may take varied forms across time, including presence, partial engagement, silence, withdrawal, refusal, persistence, or return.

These movements are treated as ethically and methodologically meaningful expressions of relation, not as risks to be mitigated or deviations to be managed.

By working through cadence rather than imposing uniform tempo, Cadent Inquiry supports conditions in which access intimacy (Mingus, 2011, 2017) may arise without being coerced.

Welcome is not contingent on disclosure, endurance, or performance, but on the sustained possibility of relation. In this way, Cadent Inquiry intervenes not by determining outcomes or redistributing control, but by reshaping the temporal and relational conditions under which inquiry becomes possible within institutional contexts.

Cadent Inquiry remains an evolving methodological practice rather than a settled framework. Our ongoing work is oriented toward cultivating conditions in which inquiry can remain livable, responsive, and ethically accountable within contexts that often privilege speed, extraction, and resolution.

We continue to develop Cadent Inquiry by practicing it: through gatherings, facilitation, making, return, and sustained attention to where relational strain, exclusion, or urgency take hold. This includes working across disciplines, institutional contexts, and forms of expertise, and remaining attentive to how cadence, access, and aspiration must be recalibrated as conditions shift.

Our hope is not to finalize or universalize this methodology, but to keep it in motion: to offer it as a shareable orientation that can be taken up, adapted, resisted, or reworked in relation to particular communities, materials, and stakes. We are committed to staying with the tensions this work surfaces, and to continuing to learn from where our methods falter, need repair, or require re-imagining.

Cadent Inquiry is sustained through relation. We understand its future not as a trajectory toward completion, but as a practice of ongoing invitation, accountability, and return.

This webpage is offered as a citable scholarly articulation of Cadent Inquiry and forms part of an evolving methodological record maintained by Axiology Clinic. It is written with academic accountability and is intended to be read, cited, and engaged within scholarly and applied research contexts. It does not claim to be a finalized, exhaustive, or authoritative account of the methodology.

The references listed here are intentionally limited. They do not attempt to represent the full range of theoretical, relational, artistic, or experiential influences that inform Cadent Inquiry. Instead, they name a small number of works that are explicitly cited in this articulation and that gesture toward broader lineages shaping the methodology. Many other influences operate through practice, facilitation, collaboration, teaching, and long-term return, and cannot be adequately captured through citation alone.

This entry should be read as a partial and situated articulation of Cadent Inquiry, offered in the spirit of transparency and accountability rather than completeness. It reflects how the methodology has been understood and practiced at a particular moment in time.

As Cadent Inquiry continues to develop through practice, dialogue, and reflection, additional articulations may be added. Earlier articulations are retained alongside later ones, not as drafts to be replaced, but as records of how the work has taken shape under different conditions and at different moments.

References for this introductory articulation of Cadent Inquiry

Davis, A.Y. (2021, 1974). Angela Davis: An autobiography. Haymarket.

Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 50th anniversary edition. (4th ed.) Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1970).

Gaudet, J.C. (2019). Keeoukaywin: The visiting way - Fostering an Indigenous research methodology. Aboriginal Policy Studies, 7(2), pp. 47-64. https://doi.org/10.5663/aps.v7i2.29336 

Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana UP.

Mingus, M. (2017, Apr 12). “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice.” [Blog Post] In Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/ 

 ——. (2011, May 5). “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link” [Blog Post] https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/ 

Thom, K.C. [@kaichengthom]. (2022, Jan 30). “Spectrum of consent” [Image & Note]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CZXRKyhurfo. 

Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood.

Wilson, S. (2021, October 20). Building Relationships with Indigenous Knowledge - Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWfrJpyVsNU [video now unavailable]

Wilson, S., Breen, A.V., Dupré, L. (Eds.) (2019). Research & reconciliation: Unsettling ways of knowing through Indigenous relationships. Canadian Scholars Press.