Across presentations, this symposium explores implications of the onto-epistemological uncertainty paradigm inherent to new materialism, process research, postqualitative research, and activist methodologies. Turning to ontology in qualitative and participatory research emphasizes research as a worlding practice itself (Lather, 2016; Gullian, 2018). Creating knowledge then becomes about respons-able creation of also the practices of knowing (Barad, 2007) in research situations that researchers are part of. Methodology is no longer unquestioned as a pre-legitimized and pre-scriptive fit, procedure or sequencing - in fact, sometimes questioned all entirely (Jackson, 2017; St. Pierre, 2021). Inquiry includes then, instead, a creative and generative assembling of the research situation and its apparatus of observation to the point of emergence where new thinking and new doings become viable. 

For many and diverse groups of emergent and senior researchers, process philosophies and their processual ontologies have been inspirational for enacting research differently and in generative ways (Revsbæk & Simpson, 2022). Postqualitative research (St. Pierre, 2023; Jackson & Mazzei, 2018), advanced in educational research and pioneering in organizational studies, as well as new feminist materialism (Barad, 2007; Barad, 2014; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017), has proliferated multiple innovative, arts-based approaches to research, creating research which move and make in/with the immanence and uncertainty of a world-in-becoming. 

Inspired by the processual and ontological turns and experimenting with the onto-epistemological uncertainties embraced in these approaches, the presenters of the symposium illustrate from empirical research situated in Germany, Belgium and Denmark how specific methodological ideas such as diffraction (Barad, 2007) and utopia as method (Levitas, 2013) are put to work in specific organizational education research engagements.

The symposium will discuss the implications of embracing onto-epistemological uncertainties in the practicing of European organizational education research, offering exemplification and illustration of such practices, and discussing their potential and limitations.

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