All narratives tell one story in place of another story (Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1994/1997, p. 178).

Here, the narrative, the most ‘natural’ form, the unmediated brute fact, the tale of experience itself, is above analysis, critique, or interpretation even though it is always already interpretation piled on interpretation (St. Pierre, 2009, p. 226).

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 25).

from within friendship you may be moved by friendship (Lugones and Spelman, 2000, p. 27).

In this conceptual essay, “an interested and inexpert examination” (Spivak, 1988, p. 299), I explore the issues surrounding speaking for, with, on behalf of, and to others in music education through narrative inquiry. As a researcher, I strive to bring forth voices in music education that are not often heard, but I also want to avoid essentializing participant experiences, fortifying stereotypes, and claiming representation. I also seek to minimize, as much as is ever possible, the exploitation of others’ stories in order advance my standing as a scholar. I am a White, cisgender, straight, English-speaking man who is not regularly marginalized by exclusionary, ableist social structures. I work from a privileged position within the academy. Can I ever hope to (re)present the stories of the Other without exploitation? Is it possible to authentically ‘honor voice’ in an academic paper? If I am conducting the research, and my name is on the paper, I have the moral and ethical obligation to examine my own role in both attempting to honor voices and potentially exploiting the experiences of Others. I continually asked myself the same question Alcoff posed, “Is my greatest contribution to move over and get out of the way?” (Alcoff, 1995, p. 100).

In my quest to illuminate stories spoken by voices not often heard in our field, and to honor the lives of the ‘researched,’ I turned to narrative inquiry. This seemed to be the perfect solution. I could (re)present participants’ stories in their own words, as they told them, unsullied by coding, thematic development, or other post-positivist methods that average-out and obscure the unique lived experiences of individuals. However, as I delved into my own narrative research projects, lingering questions remained. What was my true motivation? Was it to be able to present at a conference, to have my paper published, to be praised as a socially-conscious scholar who gives voice to the unheard? My motives, even in my self-examination, seemed nefarious. I am concerned about what I am (re)presenting when I conduct a narrative study. Whose story is it? What is being told? As Mazzei (2009) asked, “what do we seek when we seek to give ‘voice’ to our participants; what are we listening to/for in our effort to constitute voice?” (p. 47). I believe that the answers to these questions are necessarily intertwined with the ethics of speaking for/with others.

I think back to a paper I recently wrote (Powell, 2017). I shared the story of Abigail, a White woman teaching in a predominantly African-American school in Chicago. I was and remain personal friends with Abigail. I care about her and want her to have a fulfilling teaching career. However, did I truly honor my friend through my research project? Did my voice take over and crowd out her voice? Did I over-theorize her experience? Was she an over-determined subject before the study even began? Did I fit her story into a theory so that it ‘worked’? I thought about these questions as I read Lugones and Spelman (2000) as they expressed a

…distrust of the male monopoly over accounts of women’s lives…part of human life, part of living, is talking about it…being silenced in one’s own account of one’s life is a kind of amputation that signals oppression…on the whole men’s accounts of women’s lives have been at best false, a function of ignorance, and at worst malicious lies, a function of a knowledgeable desire to exploit and express (p. 18).

Of course, I let Abigail read the paper. She said she really liked it and that it captured her experience. She thanked me. Her mom thanked me. Is this type of ‘member check’ enough? What were they going to say otherwise? Surely, Abigail appreciated my effort and my taking an interest in her teaching practice. She wanted to support me as a friend. But, did I use her to get a publication, to advance myself as a scholar? Moreover, what about the voices of her Black students? I ignored them. I elevated Abigail’s privileged voice above theirs. Did I contribute to the colonizing project?

Alcoff (1995) notes that many feminist scholars, despite feeling an ethical obligation to speak for and on behalf of other women, consider speaking for others as “arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate” and may constitute “discursive coercion and even a violence” (pp. 97–98). She raises the question: can a privileged academic ever speak legitimately for others?

As social theorists, we are authorized by virtue of our academic positions to develop theories that express and encompass the ideas, needs, and goals of others. We must begin to ask ourselves whether this is ever a legitimate authority, and if so, what are the criteria for legitimacy? In particular, is it ever valid to speak for others who are unlike us or who are less privileged than us? (Alcoff, 1995, p. 99)

On the other hand, simply giving up is taking the easy way out and shirking the moral obligation of academic scholars to use their privilege, position, and resources to advance the cause of justice (see Chomsky, 1987). Avoiding speaking for or with others may allow scholars to simply avoid criticism since they only speak about their own experiences without engaging with the experiences of others. The ideal of ‘doing no harm’ is illusory, for silence itself is harmful. This is Alcoff’s (1995) counterargument: “The declaration that I ‘speak only for myself’ has the sole effect of allowing me to avoid responsibility and accountability for my effects on others; it cannot literally erase those effects” (p. 108). Alcoff also argues,

But a retreat from speaking for will not result in an increase in receptive listening in all cases; it may result merely in a retreat into a narcissistic lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility whatsoever for her society. She may even feel justified in exploiting her privileged capacity for personal happiness at the expense of others on the grounds that she has no alternative (Alcoff, 1995, p. 107).

Compelled by Alcoff’s argument, I have decided not to abandon my quest to bring often-silenced voices to the fore, but I do so with trepidation. In my effort to confront these issues, I have turned to ‘post-’ theories and post-qualitative frames of inquiry (St. Pierre, 2011) in a bricolage approach.Footnote 1 I begin with an overview of the concept of representation as expressed by ‘post-’ scholars. I then engage with the ideas of G. Spivak (1988), who famously tackled the problem of (re)presenting the voices of marginalized people. Next, I turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) concept of the rhizome and Jackson’s (2003) application of this concept within post-qualitative research, rhizovocality. Finally, I engage with Lugones and Spelman’s (2000) frame of friendship as a way to approach inquiry in a spirit of solidarity. Of course, these ideas are not new, and they have been expressed by many others before. However, I hope to provide some insight into these issues within the unique context of the field of music education.

1 Voice and Representation

My first question concerns (re)presentation. If we want to avoid misrepresenting the experience of others, should not we, as scholars, simply chronicle and report what our participants tell us, unfiltered, without any theorizing, analyzing, or connecting to larger projects? Should we not present a transparent account of the stories of others? When considering the prospect of scholars speaking for individuals from marginalized populations, Deleuze and Foucault (in Foucault, 1977) adopted a stance of intellectual abnegation with the assumption that the marginalized can transparently express their own true interests. Those that take this stance wrongly assume that our participants’ stories come to us as complete objects, that dynamics of power and privilege do not determine what is and is not said, and that the telling can ever possibly be pure. Spivak, in her famous essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak, 1988), criticized this position (only listening to) as essentializing the marginalized as nonideologically constructed subjects. By abnegating responsibility for speaking to and with (as opposed to speaking for, speaking about, and listening to) intellectuals who hold privileged positions only aid in consolidating experiences of the Other. Spivak (1988) contended that we should abandon attempts at representing an ‘authentic’ voice and be more concerned with the mechanics of the constitution of the Other, stating, “the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self’s shadow” (p. 280) and described the “intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves” as “dangerous” (p. 292). She and other scholars urge researchers to acknowledge and wrestle with their positions of privilege and power throughout one’s work in a deconstructive project (Alcoff,1995; Lugones and Spelman, 2000; Spivak, 1988).

Within music education, we run the additional risk of essentializing our participants’ musical lives. We often conflate someone’s social position, race, place of residence, socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, ability, and other factors with their musical identities. Of course these all intersect to form the musical self—there is no such thing as a musical life apart from life as a whole. However, when we use the musical identity of an individual from a marginalized group as a (re)presentation of the musical lives of all members of that group, we contribute another piece to the essentializing project.

By avoiding analysis and without providing context for our stories, we risk engaging in ventriloquism (lisahunter et al. 2013). This practice, while well-meaning in its intent to ‘let voices speak for themselves,’ may serve to essentialize the experiences of a particular participant as representative of the experiences of the larger social group in which we categorize her. Readers may make the assumption that we are holding up this story as a prototype for the experiences of those in similar circumstances, and it almost always serves to reinforce the Other as that experience that is outside the margin of the hegemonic norm.

Still, even if researchers present an honest account of their place within the project (Spivak (1988) referred to the oft-included ‘reflexive statement’ as a “meaningless piety” (p. 271)), questions linger. What is voice? Who is speaking? What is being (re)presented in narrative research?

By engaging with poststructural theories and post-qualitative frames of inquiry, I realized that I could not just record stories and present them unfiltered, whole, or ‘as-is.’ This mindset represents the false assumption that voice can speak the truth of consciousness or experience. It has become untenable for me to consider voice as something that is “present, stable, authentic, and self-reflective” (Mazzei and Jackson, 2009, p. 2). For in my interaction with participants, I am participating in the construction of their subject positions rather than simply uncovering their true, essential selves (Alcoff, 1995), and my unequal power relationship with participants shapes the words they express (Mazzei and Jackson, 2009). As Pitt and Britzman asserted, “When individuals narrate experience, they also express their affective investments in knowing and being known” (Pitt and Britzman, 2003, p. 763).

Moreover, when we privilege the spoken voice as presence, as a ‘true’ representation of experience above all other forms of communication and information, we risk missing other important aspects of the story (Derrida 1967/1997). “We often mistakenly assume that a voice spoken by our participants, by ourselves, is the voice to be given weight in the account given and heard, in deciding what gets ‘left in’ as voice and what gets left out” (Mazzei 2009, p. 54). St. Pierre (2009) echoed this call for a broader view of data as she stated, “I believe that we have burdened the voices of our participants with too much evidentiary weight” (p. 221).

Lather (2009) goes a step further and argues that we should move away from our constructs of empathy, voice, and authenticity as they reduce otherness to sameness and violate the Other as they demand totality. When we construct a narrative that is easily understandable or relatable, we construct a normative voice—one that is designed for its audience (Derrida, 2001). As Jackson (2003) stated, “…as a translator of voices, researchers’ actions are violent, forced, and foreign—at once inadequate yet necessary. The challenge is to work the tension between assuming or even desiring transparent voices” (p. 704). Lather (2009) is concerned that contemporary practices of representation (by letting participants ‘speak for themselves’) risk “a romance of the speaking subject and a metaphysics of presence that threatens to collapse ethnography under the weight of circumscribed modes of identity, intentionality and selective appropriation” (p. 20) and can lead to the appropriation of “the tragedies of others into consumption, a too-easy, too-familiar eating of the other” (p. 23). Along with Britzman (1997), Lather urges us to move away from a hero, savior, or rescuer mindset when conducting research. She contends that we should not avoid interpretation, but instead we should trouble authority and the certainty of voice.

I seek to view “research as provoking, not representing, knowledge” (Pitt and Britzman 2003 p. 769) and as problem-seeking rather than an essence-seeking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987). As Jackson (2009), echoing Derrida (1967/1997), contended, when our participants speak to us, it is not as if they are retrieving a stable past, a stable history, a contained self—the performative act of speaking in the moment produces the subject and the experience, which are always already contingent. “Certainly, truth-tellers construct many things as they represent their selves to others (and to themselves). And, this truth-telling is often plentiful with much that confuses researchers” (Jackson, 2009, p. 165). All (re)presentation of participants’ stories is a translation—a translation that does not merely reflect or imitate an original. “Translation/interpretation/representation, like any act of language, produces rather than reflects reality” (Jackson, 2003, p. 704, emphases in original), for “narratives are not the culmination of experience but constructions made from both conscious and unconscious dynamics” (Pitt and Britzman, 2003, p. 759). As a feature of their construction, words are already interpretations. How can they be brute data that speak for themselves? (St. Pierre, 2013).

St. Pierre (2009) laments that “qualitative researchers ‘find’ stories in their data and call that work analysis” (p. 227). She argues that thinking is stifled when researchers, in an attempt to present unsullied, pure, and sacrosanct voices that ‘speak for themselves,’ avoid theorizing and rigorous analysis. In St. Pierre’s (2009) view, lived experience should be problematized as a window into ideology rather than simply celebrated as authoritative. How often do we read narratives that end with a ‘happy’ ending, perfectly illustrate a pre-determined point of view, or paint the participant as a hero, savior, or saint? I think we should be suspect of such narratives, and I have been guilty of constructing (not simply presenting!) such stories.

There is never a closure to a project that purports to explain it all. There are always already meanings, intentions, and subjectivities spinning off into future significations because of what researchers can and cannot hear, because of traces of the past and present that are unspeakable, because of subjectivities that shift and contradict in the very telling of stories, the naming of experience. It is impossible, perhaps even undesirable, to tell everything (Jackson, 2003, p. 705, emphases in original).

Furthermore, believing that our participants’ stories are complete, self-contained ‘truths,’ we avoid examining what might have happened otherwise. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987), invoking “the plane of consistency,” (p. 251) might ask us if something that ‘happened’ is more ‘true’ because it happened to be the actualization of many possibilities. Other potentials might be ‘true’ as well, even if they were not actualized. Actual accounts help us understand the virtual conditions that led to the potentials in a pragmatics of the future. ‘Allowing’ stories to be told without an awareness of the larger field of potential—what might have happened otherwise—does little to allow us to envision the future and learn from the stories presented. Invoking Rajchman (1991), we might seek a “moment of erosion, collapse, questioning, or problematization of the very assumptions of the setting within which a drama may take place, occasioning the chance or possibility of another different setting” (p. viii).

2 The Rhizome and Rhizovocality

Now I turn to Jackson’s (2003) concept of rhizovocality. Jackson developed this concept with inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) concept of the rhizome. A rhizome, unlike a tree that grows upwards in a hierarchy, spreads in a multiplicity, like a ginger root. There is no beginning or end, no starting point. A rhizome can connect with other rhizomes in a spatial and temporal assemblage. To think rhizomatically is to refuse an algorithmic, linear process and to instead explore lines of flight in all directions.

Rhizovocality, in its multiplicity and contigency, is difference within and between and among, it highlights the irruptive, disruptive, yet interconnected nature of positioned voices (including the researcher’s) that are discursively formed and that are historically and socially determined—irrupting from discursive pressures within/against/outside the research process (Jackson, 2003, p. 707, emphases in original).

This way of thinking encourages the researcher to avoid segmenting reality, representation, and the subjective author, as all join together rhizomatically (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987; Jackson 2003). The search for authenticity is abandoned as the researcher lives in the uncomfortable knowing that voice can never speak a total, coherent truth. Participants cannot be essentialized as a representative of a group because they cannot (re)present themselves to others or themselves in a stable, historical manner. Rather than glossing over the messiness and complexity of trying to allow a coherent subject to speak for herself, we lean into this impossibility.

Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) urge us to work with and develop short-term memories. This presents a problem within the typical research framework, as writing it down, publishing the work, where it exists ‘forever’ in a static form, forces long-term memory, as if ‘what happened’ was static and stable, and will never be changed by future events. Long-term memory transforms our rhizomes into trees. For example, within my previous work (Powell 2017), many things happened in Abigail’s life immediately after the ‘conclusion’ of her story that retroactively changed how her experiences aligned with the theory through which I analyzed her experiences. However, the paper is now published and will exist forever as a long-term memory of a time, place, and life that has long since evolved.

In music, our research projects may freeze our participants’ musical identities in place, as our profession tends to force us into specific musical roles (e.g., the classical performer, the music education professor, the elementary music teacher, the ‘popular’ musician), although our individual musical worlds are rhizomes, having no fixed description. Our musical identities flow dynamically. Almost no one can be reliably described by a single musical signifier, but to read our job titles or our descriptions of the participants in our research reports, one gets the impression that we force pre-determined labels so we can sort, compare, and evaluate disparate musical identities, as if they are static and stable. Our need to ‘organ-ize’ the musical lives of others and ourselves in order to avoid the messy, tangled web of our musical becomings is hard to resist. However, this essentializes our participants’ musical identities and creates false oppositions. Are we forcing our participants into an artificial sense of individuality rather than helping them to explore their multiple, rhizomatic natures?

Simply letting multiple voices speak within our research also misses the complexity of the assemblage. Polyvocality, as opposed to rhizovocality, does not go far enough, as an attempt to pluralize voice “remains focused on units of voice rather than dimensions of voice” (Jackson, 2003, p. 706). When we consider voice as “desiring, discursive, and performative” (Jackson, 2009, p. 173) we cannot simply present a multiplicity of voices (e.g., the researched, researcher, and the theorist as distinct voices within a project); rather, we must attend to the rich textures of voice, which are never fully coherent and present (Jackson, 2009). Authority and power are always present in all scholarly work. A deconstructive (rather than reflexive) feminist approach to voice does not attempt to question authority and power, it abandons the hope that these issues can ever be resolved. Rather than merely acknowledging issues of representation, it confronts them (Jackson, 2003; Visweswaran, 1994).

Some may view these postmodern, post-structural ideas as an easy way out: if there is no such thing as a stable truth represented by transparent story-telling, why bother? Should we not just throw our hands up and give up? Why try to learn from a narrative that does not represent a stable reality in the first place? I take the opposite view. The recognition that our narratives are always fractured and that our interventions produce, rather than reflect, reality is liberating. It forces us to deal with the messiness of our research projects, and I think that reflects reality more than any neat-and-tidy story ever could. As Jackson (2003) stated, “This [problematizing the authenticity of voice] does not mean that voices are incapable of expressing truth; instead, voices only partially tell stories and express meaning” (p. 704). We should not “assert a dreary relativism that all meanings are equal, accurate, just, or empowering, or that communication is either impossible or a mere matter of individual thought” (Britzman, 2003, p. 37). All this ‘post-’ language should not be used “to assert that ‘the real’ does not exist. Rather, the real must be continually imagined and rearticulated” (Britzman 1994, p. 56). “Deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there is no history. It simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth” (Spivak 1996, p. 27).

Our participants’ experiences are real, and they matter. Their pain, their joy, their tragedies, their triumphs—all have real consequences in the real world. It is the (re)presentation of these real phenomena (for the purposes of understanding broader truths or essentializing unique experiences) that I have placed under scrutiny here—I am not questioning the truth of any person’s individual experience. Our interpretations of our participants’ stories, our selection of what to write down, what the participant decided to say and not say, the limitations of our medium, and the limit of voice itself prevent our scholarship from being a true analog of anyone’s lived experience.

3 Friendship

To attempt to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this essay: How can I work to bring forth voices not often heard without exploitation? I realize that I cannot step out of the way to allow these voices to speak for themselves, for my construction of a study always already involves interpretation of interpretations. Nor can I simply name my biases, privileges, and positionality so as to excuse them. Therefore, I must conclude that I can only work from within the messiness and complexity of life experience. I always have an agenda of some sort, and it cannot be pushed aside. I know that once any work of mine is published, a dynamic, retroactively shifting story is necessary frozen—a false sense of finality. All I can hope to do is live within the tension of the work.

I now turn to Lugones and Spelman (2000), who propose the concept of research through friendship. Working in this mode requires that we not see our research participants from afar, in a form of voyeurism, but to instead develop our projects with people who have been marginalized—not out of duty, obligation, or guilt, but out of friendship. This flies in the face of what we are told in our positivist research classes or by positivist journal reviewers, who urge us to seek objectivity, minimize or eliminate bias (as if that is ever possible, even in the most positivist of research), and maintain a cold, ‘scientific’ distance from our participants.

“So the motive of friendship remains both the only appropriate and understandable motive for white/Anglo feminists engaging in [theoretical work with Others]. If you enter into the task out of friendship with us, then you will be moved to attain the appropriate reciprocity of care for your and our well-beings as whole beings, you will have a stake in us and in our world, you will be moved to satisfy the need for reciprocity of understanding that will enable you to follow us in our experiences as we are able to follow you in yours” (Lugones and Spelman, 2000, p. 26).

Lugones and Spelman caution us not to befriend Others in order to do research on them (a perversion of friendship), but to work from friendship so one may be motivated to better understand the lives of the Other. “The learning is then extremely hard because it requires openness (including openness to severe criticism of the white/Anglo world), sensitivity, concentration, self-questioning, circumspection” (p. 27). This work does not involve passive immersion, but active striving to understand.

This concept of friendship, a useful and necessary position from which to engage in theory and enact change, is not without its detractors. Hannah Arendt criticized modern friendship as a private, social relationship that necessarily turns its concerns away from the public sphere (see Singer, 2017). Some scholars have argued that feminist concepts such as friendship are “not philosophy” (Nye, 1998. p. 107). Positivist researchers might criticize scholarship arising from a foundation of friendship as ‘biased’ or blind to the ‘objective truth’ of the experiences in question. Mueller (2013) counters by offering that the ability to see the world through another’s eyes, an ability gained through the work of friendship, may be a crucial way in which we can expand our perception of the world.

Friendship comes in many forms, and friends who engage in a research project together (or those who develop friendship through research) necessarily have a different relationship than those who are friends without such entanglements. Friendship of and through research can be seen as instrumental, which is, according to Aristotle, a lesser form of friendship than a virtuous friendship based on love and respect of one person for another as herself (see Lynch, 2005). However, it is when we see friendship not as a love for another self, but as a mutual connection with someone who is fundamentally different and distant from us (Derrida, 1994/2005), that possibilities for shared experience, altered perspectives, and broadened moral horizons can develop (Lynch, 2005). This difference and distance is always already present in the researcher-participant relationship, and should be seen as a positive potential for mutual growth. As Nichols (2016) reminded us, friendship is a two-way street that impacts both parties, and because the research process changes both the researcher and the ‘researched’ (Matsunobu and Bresler 2014), our joint ventures may strengthen and intensify already existing friendships.

Returning to Abigail’s story (Powell 2017), although Abigail and I were friends before the project began, did I do the work motivated by friendship? Did I seek to learn through self-questioning, or was I an opportunist who exploited an ‘interesting’ subject? Did I pre-determine what I was seeking? If I did this project again, this time motivated by friendship, how would it be different? Perhaps paradoxically, a position of friendship may have resulted in me being more critical of Abigail, to problematize her relationship with her students to a greater degree, to not excuse some of her actions as those of a well-intentioned novice. A true friend sees the complexities and flaws within another friend, as they realize those things about themselves (and all human beings). After all, no one’s story can serve as a perfect example of anything.

Positive examples of friendship can be found within music education scholarship. Nichols (2013) (re)presented Rie’s Story, Ryan’s Journey in the spirit of deep care and concern for her co-author, even if she did not explicitly use the term ‘friendship’ as I have used it here. Kruse (2016) described developing a “meaningful friendship” (p. 243) with Terrence, whom Kruse describes as his ‘informant.’ Kruse also beautifully illustrated a gateway to developing friendship: making music together. In both cases, the personal friendship that each scholar developed with their participant made possible a deep, nuanced examination of experience. Far from cold, distanced reports, these papers represent powerful constructions of life that can only be shared between friends.

How does rhizovocality intersect with the concept of friendship? Working through both concepts compels us to see our participants’ voices as multiply-connected assemblages that cannot be easily framed or boiled down to essences. We must see how our participants’ experiences flow in and out of their specific communal contexts—they are not stuck in time and place so that we may conveniently observe them and write them down. Voices are always becoming (Jackson, 2003) rather than moving toward wholeness. Importantly, rather than seeking to remake voices in our own image and claim authority, we, through a friendship that recognizes and appreciates difference, realize that we must allow voices to spread on their own, to “rupture into lines of flight, deterritorializing any demand for coherence or stability” (Jackson, 2003, p. 707).

Working from friendship will not allow us to construct research criteria for a narrative project and then seek a participant who fits. I believe a friend does not try to pin another friend down, to essentialize her experience, to make a neat and tidy package of her story. We do not burden a friend with the weight of providing evidence to illustrate our theory or our pre-existing categories. We do not insist that a friend remain static in order for our research to have long-term legitimacy. We understand that our friend’s life, like our life, is messy, always flowing, never resting, and never easy to sum up. We know that we can never represent our friend’s experience purely and perfectly. We work to understand our friend’s community and culture. We are careful when we theorize our friend’s experience, but we also assume that our friend can theorize alongside us. We do not tokenize our friend; rather, we work alongside our friend in anti-oppressive, antiracist, anti-sexist, and anti-colonial projects. We understand that a friend interacts with many musics and ways of musicking in a rhizomatic manner. We know that our friend has real experiences in real life, but acknowledge that is not what we ‘capture’ when we develop research projects. It is through the honoring of our friend that we refuse to portray her as having a stable, unified voice that represents her ‘truth.’ Rather, we exist within the rhizome, as all of our voices connect in a new assemblage—they spread, multiply, branch-out, and refuse to end or begin. It is in the spirit of friendship that we seek to “make maps, not photos” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 25).