On staying: Extended temporalities, relationships and practices in community engaged scholarship

Will Mason

doi:10.1177/14687941211049318

Abstract

This article examines the complexity and affordances of staying in ‘the field’. Time as a resource for qualitative research is widely experienced as diminishing. Yet increasingly, academic emphasis is also being placed on the merits of time intensive approaches, like participatory scholarship. This tension raises critical questions about the ethics and practices of collaboration within arguably narrowing parameters. Taking a view from the edges of conventional research practice, this article focuses on staying beyond the formal completion of a sociological research project. Drawing on over 10-years of collaboration with youth service providers in an English city, I examine the dynamics and complexities of staying, where temporalities, relationships and practices extend beyond research. In doing so, this article contributes to methodological debates about research exit and participation, by introducing staying as a practice that affords new collaborative freedoms and possibilities.

Highlights

Methodological reflections on withdrawal from fieldwork or ‘research exit’ are relatively widespread (Batty, 2020; Caretta and Cheptum, 2017; Delamont, 2016; Qualitative Research 0(0)Michailova et al, 2014; Iversen, 2009)
This article has contributed to methodological accounts of ‘staying’ in community engaged scholarship (Rupp and Taylor, 2011)
Despite the well-recognised ethical complexities of failing to leave I have presented ‘staying’ as a productive relational practice with potential ethical affordances, derived from deeper affective ties and enhanced opportunities for reciprocity, rooted in purposeful investments beyond research. In this respect, can minimize the exploitations associated with extractive research, through the extension of relationships beyond contractual bargains, towards more critically reflexive forms of interdependency and mutual understandings of intention

Summary

Introduction

Methodological reflections on withdrawal from fieldwork or ‘research exit’ are relatively widespread (Batty, 2020; Caretta and Cheptum, 2017; Delamont, 2016; Qualitative Research 0(0)Michailova et al, 2014; Iversen, 2009). By offering a longitudinal and retrospective account of ongoing community engagement, I present staying as a productive relational practice with new collaborative ethics and affordances.

Results

Conclusion