Our paper encourages an emotional approach for research in social sciences, but also explores the possibilities of an associative-dialogical and collaborative perspective on knowledge production in times perceived as ›unusual‹. Through the chronological embedding and interconnection of diverse (auto-)ethnographic episodes since the right-wing extremist attack in Hanau on 19th February 2020 and the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak in Germany, we reconstruct the way our perception patterns have developed until the deadline for this article, mid-April 2020. In this we follow the thoughts of feminist theorists (Haraway 1988; Richardson 1993; Militz/Faria/Schurr 2019) who argue for such an approach to knowledge production. We begin with our feeling of emotional involvement while at the same time not being surprised, and we question how this translates into our research practice.