Abstract
The staccato rhythms of experiential time remain obscured in much of the literature on participatory research, where time is treated as a reassuring constant – a backdrop for human activity. This article addresses the discordances between lived temporalities and existing theorisations of participatory methodologies. It takes participatory research with lone child migrants as a particularly rich case to think with, given the proliferation of contradictory and often punitive applications of time these young people encounter in their interactions with migration and welfare regimes. The core argument developed is that unless temporality is given due theoretical and methodological attention, aims of contesting and unsettling inequities through participatory research will have limited success and can wind up reproducing exclusions and oppressions. In response to these critiques, the paper temporalizes participatory research through three reconstructions: working with and against time, de-centring shared time and collectivising the time of participatory research.
Highlights
Keywords change-oriented research, migration studies, participatory research, separated child migrants, temporality, time, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Hawre closed his eyes and lowered his head into his hands to convey his exhaustion across the virtual distance that separated us. He had just joined an online meeting with two university-based researchers and two other ‘Young Researchers’ involved in the Children Caring on the Move (CCoM) participatory research project
I elaborate on contemporary theorisations of plural and contradictory temporalities, demonstrating the complex, and often punitive and controlling, conditions they create for people on the move, and the ways in which the smooth flow of time envisioned in the literature contradicts lived experiences of migration and the practice of doing participatory research (PR)
For many of the Young Researchers on CCoM, like Hawre, this has involved attempting to stay on top of research activities at the same time as frantically completing paperwork for a new asylum claim; studying for exams and qualifications in hopes of making a future in the UK, including one that is recognised as qualifying them for settlement; applying for housing or benefits to avoid destitution; and working to save money for the means of life, transnational families, or to pay off migration debts
Summary
Hawre closed his eyes and lowered his head into his hands to convey his exhaustion across the virtual distance that separated us. Keywords change-oriented research, migration studies, participatory research, separated child migrants, temporality, time, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children It is this discordance, where lived experience and research practice jar with existing theorisations of participatory methodologies, that this article speaks, asking: What is the importance of time in how we conceptualise and conduct PR?
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