<p>A significant body of interdisciplinary literature has responded to theoretical, methodological, and empirical challenges at the nexus of post, -phenomenological, -humanist, -feminist, - colonial, -structural, and non, or more-than-representational thinking. This paper contributes to that progress through engagement with debates regarding research ethics. Beyond formal academic, political, and personal ethical statements including auto-biographical and auto-ethnographic content we show how our study of female migrant building workers in China was enriched by elaboration of more-and-less reflexive and more-often-than-not unspoken thoughts and embodied-emotions. Insights were teased out through contingent process orientated accounts of being and becoming research-ers. These subjectivities were sedimented across past, present, and future lives. Accordingly, we explore critical opportunities enabled by foregrounding disclosures of situated knowledges, positionality, reflexivity, and power relations usually excluded from academic research and writing. We do so via ethical discussion of response-abilities, a-count-abilities and cognate questions regarding ‘reason’ and ‘worth’. Specifically, we add value to longstanding work within our own discipline towards <i>making geography matter</i> and signpost new terrain to inspire thinking, feeling, talking, and writing that responds to a current upsurge in questions regarding <i>how geographic thought happens</i> and <i>how geographers become geographers</i>. Concluding, we signpost opportunities afforded by more-than-qualitative epistemologies that add ethical valence to social science scholarship both within and beyond universities.</p>