Some might say ethnographic research and Participatory Action Research (PAR) are compatible (Eisenhart 2019). This paper, instead, discusses a project where the two perspectives were not compatible at all. Not by its methodological nature but because of the constraints and barriers engaging with the field. By shifting towards a more–than–human perspective (Haraway 2003; 2008) and taking an (auto-)ethnographic aspect of PAR into account, a new method arose and gained fruitful insights for the research. PAR (Bergold and Thomas 2012; Cornish et al. 2023) and ethnographic research (Hammersley 2017) are initiated by identifying a field, a conflict, or an interesting matter. But what if, in the end, there is just a loose grid of networks, no apparent conflict, and no people engaging with issues of interest? That was precisely the case within one of the 19 research cases within the Horizon 2020 funded AECED project. In the so-called “commoning case”, the team was highly interested in researching the use and the educational methods among an open-source card deck presenting the “Pattern Language of Commoning”(Helfrich and Petzold 2021, Bollier and Helfrich 2019). Therefore, possible collaborators and participants from a broad community in Germany had to be gathered. There was no everyday setting where the use of the cards could be observed from a participant observer perspective. The only possibility of grasping the object was through the narration of users through interviews. The only reliable companion was the card deck itself. Since the card deck was not used in the field regularly, I only could start observing the object as an everyday companion and presenting it to interested people, considering it for important decisions and asking it for help. This interaction and mostly the reactions of interactors were highly subjective, but why not make this individual perspective explicit through an auto-ethnographic lens (Ellis et al. 2010; Chang 2016; Edwards 2021)? This explorative research method made the implicit abilities of the card deck visible through contact with its users. This befriending moment helped the researcher maneuver into the field and made its abilities as a boundary object visible (Weber 2024).

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