This keynote will draw attention to the contemporary enterprise of re-searching and teaching-learning in higher education. In particular, it upfronts the role of creativity and curiosity for transcending reductionist binaries that have and that continue to frame how theories and methods are dealt with in the craft of the social scientist.

By engaging analytically with the interface of analogue and digital technologies, I will discuss continuing epistemological and methodological lacunas, including researchers’ and teachers’ taken-for-granted assumptions when researching and teaching in contemporary times.

Calling for multi-scalar, multimodal, and significantly – mobile gazing, I will illustrate new theorizing that embraces scholarly accounts as being nomadic and emergent, rather than given and static. Such a stance challenges conceptualizations of what, where, why and when data in Virtual Exchange gets located, how teaching-learning gets conceptualized in Virtual Exchange, and what is deemed as human-nonhuman and situated-distributed practices in contemporary human existence.

Arguing from an undisciplinary, trans-method’s sociomaterial stance, I will push for non-programmatic episto-methodologies that highlight the researchers’ mobile gaze on the researched (i.e., humans, objects, research foci) and problematizes teachers and learners gaze on the what, where, why and who of collaboration.

Drawing on a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framing, this keynote will illustrate how conceptualizations of communication, culture and diversity are entangled with a scholar’s learning to notice in the re-searching endeavour. My overarching argument aligns with an emergent call within research and higher education for going beyond its universalizing monolithic ethos.