Practice research, underpinned by new materialism, embraces new and different ways of researching; a making and remaking. But this approach also disrupts the practices and discourses that make and remake the identities of researcher as subject and participant as research object; what is of interest is not the subject or object of the research but the space between, the withness. In this chapter I explore and examine how these spaces can be worked, how these intra-actions enable this continuous making and remaking or reproduction and renegotiation of ‘identities’, and how ways of working the between are not predetermined or planned because they are shared places of discovery and learning (Page 2012a). These concerns, issues and questioning of care are not specific to place-worlds – they are entangled with wider, global discourses and power relations. This chapter plunges into the complexity, the colour, texture and messiness of the ethics of new materialist practice research, and attempts to address researching with care: mind, body, spirit with matter.

Ethics and New Materialist Practice Research

At a postgraduate research level, regardless of country, institution and so on, all students are required to fill in a form and address questions about who they will be researching with (the participants/informants/subjects, depending where and how the research is positioned) and the ways identities and data will be protected. I am also fairly confident in stating that most researchers in universities would follow a fairly similar procedure. As Boden et al. claim, ‘the new ethics regimes taking root in universities sediment rules and codes in centralised policies, bureaucratic procedures and processes that delimit academic freedom to roam critically and creatively’ (2009: 728). Obviously, for funding applications and scientific research there are additional layers, paperwork, procedures and so on. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) are the main funding bodies in the UK that share ethical guidance. The ESRC website states that research ethics