To ask ‘how do you do what you do?’ is both a technical and personal question. Brandi Wilkins Cantanese, Nicola Mārie Hyland, and Ben Spatz complicate the idea that methods are separable from researchers’ lives, while advocating for decolonizing research. Methods implicate both what and when: they are immanent in everything the scholar does. Exploring methods that gather information in relational and communal ways, the conversants reflect on how using various media in performance research (re-)contextualizes methods and the binary between bodily presence and recorded acts. They conclude that interdisciplinary research should invest in decolonizing methodologies as an ethical practice that both augments and challenges academic training.