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

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.

Qualitative research methods I: Emotionally engaged approaches to working with vulnerable participants

“…Research is often transitory in nature and where participants note the benefits of their involvement within a cathartic or catalytic space, more evidence is needed of long term impact (Zimmermann and Forstmeier, 2020). Where appropriate, Mason (2021) argues for the benefits of ‘staying’ in community engaged scholarship, that is extended connections with field sites beyond a designated research time frame. This practice moves beyond the oftentimes ‘contractual bargains’ we make with our participants, however, it requires rethinking funding and institutional support, particularly time constraints.…”

Engaged Anthropology and Scholar Activism

“…In the neoliberal university, the adoption of neoliberal policies has resulted in a combination of narrowing time regimes and increased demands for productivity that renders research and teaching profitable. This acceleration comes at the expense of more ethical forms of doing research that require a different pace to pursue more horizontal relations and long-term collaboration (Grandia 2015;Mason 2021). Enacting "slowness" in our research can thus be a way of creating the future in the present, and at the same time contributes to the production of double contentions.…”

CiviAct: Negotiating ‘fields of paradox’ in anti-racist university community partnerships

“…For hooks (2000: 94) realising a love ethic means utilising ‘care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge’ in our everyday lives. This is a framework that connotes not only interpersonal commitments but a willingness to demonstrate qualities – like trustworthiness – that need to be earned, over time (Costas Batlle and Carr, 2021; Mason, 2021). As Prainsack and Buyx (2011: 49) put it, solidarity requires ‘enactments of the willingness to carry costs to assist others’.…”

“…Academia, for instance, is increasingly described as a field permeated by neoliberal logics of competition and individualised pressures to secure the resources to do funded research and benefit from the associated capital and esteem (Edwards, 2022; Mountz et al, 2015). As Mason (2021) has highlighted elsewhere, these are pressures that produce the paradoxical effect of valorising community engaged scholarship whilst undermining the conditions necessary to realise its potential ( see also Heney and Poleykett, 2021; Williams et al, 2020).…”

“…Since 2009 Will has been involved in youth work delivery across several neighbourhoods and provisions. His 12-year history at the time of writing includes youth work delivery, bid writing for community projects, community consultation activities, participatory filmmaking projects, action research projects and creative writing classes (Mason, 2021; Mason et al, 2019; Mason with Unity Gym Project, 2021). Will is a volunteer practitioner with Unity Gym Project, a Sheffield based youth charity committed to the promotion of health and wellbeing.…”