This article came out of many years of thinking and talking together about our earlier work in an urban youth garden in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. We were really interested in the way youth talked about the changes in themselves as people who could learn to care for each other and shared spaces (commons). We had the opportunity to publish in a special issue of Cities on storying the 'counter-city', so we used our thinking

I wrote this piece for a special issue on emerging methodologies in care and care-giving in Asia Pacific. In it, I reflect on some of the embodied aspects of ethnographic methods that we sometimes overlook. I use Anna Tsing's idea of awkward engagements, but apply it as an embodied method for sensing and responding to different pluriversal realities. The context is myself as a Pākehā New Zealand European person doing research work in the