Abstract
This article revisits critical encounters and engagements with educational research projects over a 10-year period. Drawing upon empirical data and project documentation, the article seeks to open up the powers of production that are at play and asks: What room is there for both experience and experiment in research? The problems that preoccupy us as researchers are often difficult to discern until they are well under way. There is a creative remembering that inevitably resides, and is residual, in any research endeavour. It is work within the milieu of texts rather than upon them and where the patterns could not have been known beforehand. It also acknowledges and works with data that doesn't usually fit in, whilst also working with affect, a dimension which is sometimes ignored at our peril. It is, in short, an invitation to consider how silence can trump the effort of words.