The discourse on prefigurative politics often revolves around politics and political actions, especially political actions that are actively and consciously engaging with certain tenets of prefiguration. While several scholars have advocated for blurring the boundaries between knowledge and praxis, the implications of prefigurative politics and its (im)possibilities in contemporary modes of funded and participatory research have still not been mapped, barring a few exceptions. The paper will draw from a series of auto/ethnographic vignettes spread between 2014 to 2019 encompassing my sporadic fieldwork (2019–2025) with an autonomous worker’s collective active in Faridabad—an old industrial town in North India to explore the contours and dilemmas of thinking/doing prefigurative politics in research in the contemporary. The paper will weave auto/ethnographic insights that oscillate between situated and experimental knowledge(s) that redefine the epistemological boundaries and the grounds of knowledge production to explore where, when and how prefigurative politics begins and ends in contemporary research and writing practices reflecting on moments of transition, transformation, and crises.