Abstract

Drawing on qualitative sports research, we present two stories in this article to explore how researchers may orient to boundaries within research encounters and perform boundary crossing and re-crossings. The performative narrative analysis of the stories highlights the fluidly shifting dynamics of sustaining and crossing boundaries and how this ongoing process is shaped by dialogical and monological relations. Through our analysis, we suggest that questions concerning “how close is too close” to research participants and “how far is too far” from them are neither simple nor straightforward. These questions are complex and shift in time and space, ebbing and flowing, as people move between merging and unmerging, self-sufficiency and non-self-sufficiency, and finalizing and unfinalizing practices that colonize and de-colonize. Some reflections on what might be learned from theories of dialogue and boundary crossings within the domain of sport and exercise psychology in relation to colonizing practices, empathy, and claiming the final work are provided.