T.L. Cowan and Jas Rault’s collaborative work is a vibrant and bold crosspath of scholarly rigor, artistic experimentation, and radical queer methodologies. Grounded in trans-feminist and queer (TFQ) commitments, their partnership thrives on the creative and political tensions between critical digital methods and the unruly, lived experiences of TFQ communities. Their book Heavy Processing (2024) emerges from a decade-plus collaboration rooted in community-based performance, data ethics, and queer feminist archival praxis. In it, they chart a path through research terrain marked by acronyms, metaphors, and jokes –methods that offer “a desiring, pleasurable, and hard-working set of attachments and sensibilities to relationship-based, complex knowledge formation”. Together, Jas and T.L. reject extractive digital tools in favor of slower, “process-heavy” methodologies, which prioritize practices of intimacy and accountability. As they write, “When we hear data, all we want are stories” –a kind of manifesto for relational, reflexive scholarship in a world too often driven by speed and scale.

In this podcast, we talk with Jas and T.L. about their early ambition to digitally chart every TFQ cabaret in existence, beginning with Cabaret Commons. From there, we explore the dialectics between computational logics and digital archives, and move into the thick of digital research ethics. We delve into risks, refusals, feelings, ephemeralities, and intimacies. Their deep humor and care animate a self-reflexive, collaborative approach to knowledge-making – one that generously shares what forms their past trajectories in relation to the temporal crises of today and the ethics of time itself.

Listen to the podcast here.