Tangled sideways research: Reimagining temporality in research with children

Times knitted together

I was drawn to Karen Barad’s work (2016, 2018) because of their interdisciplinary approach, weaving together examples from physics, literature, history, activism, and more to unpack the implications of being attuned to homogenous and colonizing linear time (Barad, 2016). This connected approach matches my experiences as an elementary educator and a mother of two children. As Sparrman (2020: 22) suggested, “children do not live their lives through academic disciplines but across them.” Barad’s (2016) work also aligns with the foundational arguments of childhood studies that challenged a developmental perspective of children and the more recent push to extend this thinking by looking at the past, present, and future of childhoods (Hanson, 2017; Spyrou, 2020).

Barad (2016, 2018) drew on theories from quantum physics to disrupt both time and space as givens. They discussed how time and space are “iteratively and interactively produced” using the term spacetimemattering as the confluence of these concepts (Barad, 2016). Barad has employed several metaphors in describing this way of thinking time differently to help imagine what this can mean. They described time as having a thickness where a particular moment has all times in it, with past, present, and future knitted together. I encountered this as an elementary educator at a school in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. I came to understand how the Jewish diaspora post World War II continues to be part of the present for children and families. One of my students brought her grandmother in to share her experiences as a Holocaust survivor. A different student shared how her mother, born and raised in the U. S., had spent 2 years in Israel serving in the army and another student had traveled to Israel during a vacation with his family. For these children the past was thickly enmeshed with the present as well as the spaces of suburban United States and Israel.

This moment, the “here now” can also be thought of as a “dense seed filled with other times and spaces” (Barad, 2016). In this way, the seed of the here now has the potential to expand in multiple directions, growing with past, present, and future together. In Barad’s (2016, 2018) work, this is significant in undoing “universal empty time” and its colonizing nature and recognizing how the past is alive ontologically and materially. The present does not erase or replace all that has happened in the past. Rather, the past is never left behind and always open. For research about childhoods, this resonates with recent discussions about been, being, and becoming (Hanson, 2017; Sparrman, 2020). Childhoods can be seen as complex times with past, present, and future “threaded through one another” (Barad, 2018: 67). Temporal entanglements blur the boundaries between child and adult, complicating the childhoods about which scholars claim to study. In addition, when researchers understand times as woven together, it requires reflexivity about how their own temporal entanglements shape their research and relationships with children.

Two studies of transnational childhoods approach time with such a knitted approach, blurring the child–adult binary. Yngvesson (2013) and Orellana and Phoenix (2017) conducted analyses of adult narratives, noting the tangle of temporalities in how stories are told and events are experienced. Yngvesson (2013) argued that the experiences of transnational adoptees and their stories of return suggest a continual process of becoming that challenges temporal linearity. This stands in contrast to state policies that “cancel the pre-adoptive past of a child” in the name of development and integration into the adopted family (Yngvesson, 2013: 355). For example, Yngvesson (2013) shared the memory of a parent bringing her daughter back to the orphanage where she was adopted. The daughter wondered “what if” her mother had adopted one of the other children and if she were one of the orphans left behind looking back at them (Grünewald, 1980 as cited in Yngvesson, 2013: 355). Yngvesson (2013: 358) discussed how the past and present converge in this moment of the “child who could have been me,” where the child becomes both the adopted child and the child left behind. In a similar fashion, the article discussed the experiences of transnational adopted adults returning to the country of adoption while pregnant or with their own children, “as/with the child who was not adopted, in this way reclaiming the abandoned child as their own and positioning themselves as the birth mother who survives (keeps their child)” (Yngvesson, 2013: 358). Taking this convergent stance toward time where past and present can co-exist and inform each other results in findings that challenge a child-adult binary and illustrate the multiplicity within childhoods. Working from this sense of temporality allowed Yngvesson (2013) to better understand her participants’ multiple identities, not only as transnational individuals, but also as adult–child adoptees with dynamic relationships to family.

Orellana and Phoenix (2017) discussed how childhood is “actively taken along into adult lives” (Orellana and Phoenix, 2017: 184), moving it into the present with a sense of aliveness in how it impacts relationships and future identities. They analyzed the narratives of one woman, Eva, across the ages of 19, 26, 27, and 33. Eva reflected on and reworked themes of childhood language brokering within the space of her current circumstances. These ranged from providing care through helping translate to experiencing trauma translating in difficult situations to wishing for a time when she was needed to language broker to projections of when her own children will not need her. How her childhood showed up and affected her sense of self and relationship with her parents and siblings shifted based on such things as moving away from home and having children. Recognizing childhood as alive and dynamic in adulthood, not simply left behind, allowed for the complexity of Eva’s relationship with language brokering to surface in the findings. This challenged the boundary between childhood and adulthood created by linear conceptions of time. When times are viewed as entwined, participants’ identities and experiences can be seen as fluid. This brings to light not only the diversity of childhoods, but also how any single childhood moves and changes as it is “taken along” across the lifespan.

While these studies focus on adult narratives, Conrad (2012) emphasized the significance of exploring temporality from children’s perspectives through writing. In her analysis of poems written by children, Conrad (2012: 209) discussed the notion of “dynamic temporality,” children’s “creative manipulation of temporal registers” such as stretching out present or past moments using progressive tenses or “looping the past into the future through the present.” Through her close examination of poems, Conrad (2012: 216) demonstrated how children “subvert” linear temporality by taking varied and divergent views of time, emphasizing the multitude of child perspectives on time. Conrad’s (2012) use of dynamic temporality differs from Barad’s (2016, 2018) notion of temporal entanglements in her emphasis on children’s authority over time in their writing. In contrast, Barad (2016, 2018) described temporality as existing, outside of human control, as times threading through each other whether or not we are aware of them. From this perspective, the poems can be seen as reflective of children’s experiences of times knitted together, not necessarily their agency over time.

Hohti (2016: 182) drew directly on Barad’s temporal entanglements in her research within her elementary classroom that examined “the particularities of different times…as produced in relationships among spatial, material and social factors and more.” She invited children to become ethnographers, using a laptop to narrate what they noticed happening in the classroom. Hohti (2016) discussed how through the study and her analysis, children were produced in ways that challenged prior notions of their identities in the classroom. For example, two students, Titta and Siiri, who had been seen as “problem children” in need of “special support” are instead positioned as best friends composing the life of the music classroom, the here now that is tangled with the computer, “the recorders, the sitting and standing bodies, the silences, and the playing” (Hohti, 2016: 187). These findings echo Barad’s (2016) description of spacetimematterings in which “particles have to interact with all others to be who they are.” When space, time, and materiality are considered together, deficit narratives of children are challenged and the perspectives of Titta and Siiri are privileged. In addition, time as a neutral component of research is disrupted. Hohti (2016: 189) described how “multiple hybrid and porous moments of now” were generated by children, demonstrating that time was not experienced equally for all children. As illustrated through this research, childhoods are what they are through the intra-action (Barad, 2016) of space, time, and matter.

Understanding times as knitted together allows for the complexity of identities of participants and their relationships with others in research. Children are not just of a certain age or place, they are a tangle of times, experiences, spaces, and relations. Drawing on Barad’s notions of temporality privileges perspectives that are often marginalized and when past, present, and future are thought of together, boundaries of childhood and adulthood are blurred.

Expansions and relations in time

Like Barad (2016), Stockton sought to complicate the dominant narrative of time as linearity and progress. In addition to growing up, Stockton (2009) wrote about growing sideways, which refers to the “energy, pleasure, vitality, and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of connections and extensions that are not reproductive” (Stockton, 2009: 13). This differs from developmental progression into adulthood and instead emphasizes extensions, “the width of a person’s experiences and ideas, their motives and their motions” (Stockton, 2009: 11). The focus is on lived experiences, connections, and relations, not outcomes. This type of growing is being “suspended in an intensity that is a motion, an emotion, and a growth, even though from conventional angles it may look like a way of going nowhere” (Stockton, 2009: 113). As a parent of a thirteen-year-old and a ten-year-old I have witnessed this full immersion into something, whether it is a book series, a sport, a video game, or a type of toy. A few years ago, my daughter was into slime, watching videos about it, buying different types, and experimenting with making it at home. She would spend hours squishing different colored and textured slime, listening to the sounds it made, rating its fluffiness or stickiness, and noting what to try next time. She was suspended in all materiality that was slime.

Myers (2016) discussed such immersive experiences in her postqualitative inquiry in a kindergarten classroom. She explored the intra-actions among a group of five- and six-year-old girls, herself as the researcher, and materials such as blocks and blankets that were all part of play around babies. She noted that as the girls were engrossed in becoming babies, asking her to swaddle them in blankets and babbling to each other, the teachers in the classroom viewed such play as immature. Her article explored what can emerge if instead of placing this play along a developmental timeline, researchers are open to what the intra-actions produce and what can be learned from and about children from these interconnections. While she drew on Pickering’s (1995) notion of the mangle, the ways she discusses the girls’ play demonstrated how they are suspended in the experience of being babies. Myers (2016: 428) noted how the girls “were materially and discursively aware regarding the complexity of their play, commenting how babies emerged through more-than-human ideas, movements, resistances, feelings.” She suggested that instead of analyzing play for developmental appropriateness, researchers and practitioners can consider what play does and all of the components (e. g., blankets, blocks, people, space) that participate in producing the play. When the temporal gaze is shifted from growing up to growing sideways, it can open space to recognize the breadth and depth of children’s experiences.

Focusing on horizontal movement and expansion is of particular significance for children who have not historically been thought to part of the (reproductive) future of a society. While Stockton concentrated on sexuality, this relates to all children growing to the side of cultural norms and ideals. Studies examining the lived experiences of young people in non-dominant communities can help us explore the possibilities of considering such expansions. Vitus (2010) and Rübner Jørgensen (2017) considered the relationships of young people in transnational spaces and their uncertainties about their future lives, including such things as where they will reside, their social and familial networks, schooling, and employment. Vitus (2010: 26) took a critical look at the “temporal conditions of living in asylum centres” and the impacts of this on children and young people. The study was framed around the question of why these young people show symptoms of “non-thriving” (Vitus, 2010: 29) and her findings pointed to the considerable toll waiting can take on young people, such as restlessness, fatigue, and despair, and the lived implications of asylum policies for childhoods.

The idea of “non-thriving” permeates this study as well as the concept of the young people being stuck in time, waiting. In this way, the study was shaped by a linear concept of time viewing growth as progress or production (e. g., children’s outcomes in schooling or what they do in free time). When viewed through this lens of temporality, the young people were seen as living neither in the present nor the future (nor really the past, though this is not explicitly addressed). If instead the young people are seen as growing sideways (to the side of countries, languages, cultures), these suspensions in intensities that manifest in restlessness and fatigue can help us to understand their experiences in different ways. Vitus (2010: 35) mentioned how a restless six-year-old Adnan spoke “in what sounded like a mix of several languages (he spoke a little Roma, Dutch, German and English but no Danish).” This points to the opportunities for multilingualism in these asylum center spaces where families from many different countries reside together. In addition, the young people who spoke with Vitus (2010) discussed the affective dimension of having family members in different countries and with different residence statuses. These connections play a significant role in the lives of transnational youth who share the difficulties of being apart from family members or having to choose with whom to live. Thinking with this as an expansion, brings to light the care work the young people were doing in these spaces, whether that be attending to sick relatives, language brokering for adults or actively maintaining connections with family members across spaces.

Rübner Jørgensen (2017) described the implications of making such a shift in temporal orientation. She noted how her study aimed to “explore the young people’s ideas about their future educational, occupational and personal trajectories following compulsory schooling” (Rübner Jørgensen (2017: 25). Yet when she engaged with her participants, she found that the discussions were more focused on their current experiences as migrants rather than their potential future lives (Rübner Jørgensen, 2017: 23). This shift allowed Rübner Jørgensen (2017) to acknowledge the ways in which the young people were immersed in uncertainty and the back-and-forth connections with family members and friends in different locations. The young people discussed ambiguity with regard to their future locations, impacted by perceived opportunities for schooling and employment and mixed feelings of belonging to the country of residence (Rübner Jørgensen, 2017: 27). Their comparisons of life in different countries and awareness of respective opportunities highlights knowledge unique to the circumstances of these transnational youth and their familiarity with multiple spaces.

In addition, young people spoke of the connections with family members living in the country of residence, others living in their country of origin and still others living in third countries for employment purposes. These webs of relationships, their sideways relations, were significant sources of “support, advice, direction, and practical help” (Rübner Jørgensen, 2017: 27), which allowed the young people to expand while living in ambiguity. Family relationships influenced when and with whom young people migrated to the current country and where they imagined they might be in the future. While sharing the lived experiences of transnational spaces, the intersectional identities of the young people, such as country of origin, languages spoken, and locations of family members, impacted their emotional state and the connections they made during these expansions. These diverse experiences of transnational young people illustrate the many ways of growing sideways.

Wendy Luttrell (2020) likewise emphasized the significance of relationships to young people’s lives in her longitudinal research. She asked working-class young people to capture “what matters most” to them through photos and videos at age 10 and then again at age 17 or 18 (Luttrell, 2020: 167). Sharing these with her and each other as teens, one theme that emerged was a focus on relationships with peers, developed through such things as social media, gaming, and hanging out. They often talked about this relational time in contrast to time focused on being “productive,” like finishing homework. Luttrell highlighted the importance of “being-in-time” with others for the young people, noting how this aspect of their lives positioned them to the side of the dominant, white, middle-class narrative of productivity and future employability (Luttrell, 2020: 187). She described the youth’s use of social media platforms as “technologies of self” that enable youth to exercise their “authorial agency, even if it’s not ‘productive’ or achievement-oriented” (Luttrell, 2020: 182). This additive way of conceiving time, holding relational time alongside linear time, allowed Luttrell to be attuned to young people’s connections. These relationships were significant to young people’s identities and they ways in which they cared for themselves, their peers, and their families.

These studies demonstrate how tuning into ways childhoods are suspended in intensities, emotions, and connections can offer different paths to understanding research with children. When growing is not measured against developmental time, discourses of being stuck or delayed are challenged. This is significant, especially for childhoods most often framed by these deficit discourses due to intersectional identities including race, gender, immigrant status, dis/ability, and sexual orientation. Tuning into the breadth of children’s experiences can help both acknowledge the inequities of childhoods and the resources and ways of knowing of non-dominant childhoods. Thinking with these expansions encourages researchers to recognize and value children’s connections and all of the components that play a role in producing childhoods.

Shifting temporality and reimagining sharing time

In this section, I illustrate how employing these divergent conceptions of time helped me reimagine findings from my own research. Over the course of one school year, I engaged in a participatory study with a small, diverse group of nine- and ten-year-old children focusing on how they explore matters that interest them. We met as a research group once a week for an hour drawing on multimodal methods of exploration, such as collaging, photography, and mapping. Each week the group began with an informal sharing time and it is with this aspect of the study that I now try to think time differently.

Sharing began as simple verbal check-in, such as “How was your week?” I thought of it as a way to get to know more about each other and build relationships. I envisioned sharing as a necessary, yet not central, aspect of our time together and worried when too much time was spent on it. In this way, I framed it as time that was not doing the work of the project, as “unproductive.” However, the students took the initiative to grow it into a space for artifacts that they wanted the group to know more about. Every week a few students would independently bring photos, drawings, toys, books and other objects of significance, asking for time to present them to the group. As children continued to enter excitedly with items and stories for the group, we literally and figuratively created space for them. Taking up conceptions of knitted times and growing sideways opens up other ways of understanding the children’s sharing and how it was integral to both our time together and my research interests.

Billie: This is Mr. Mousey. He’s soft, you can pass him.

This exchange is typical of the sharing that took place at the beginning of the research group sessions, with Billie introducing her squishy toy, Mr. Mousey. Squishies (soft, smushy toys) were a popular topic and many students brought in different types for the group to see and touch over the course of several weeks. Similar to my daughter with slime, these children were immersed in squishies, bringing them to school and sharing them at recess. In the group, children discussed squishes with each other including watching YouTubers who dedicate videos to squishies (e. g., showing different types, cutting them open to reveal what is inside). One student, Cristina, brought her own homemade squishy to share and the group eagerly asked her to teach us how to make one. I brought the materials she suggested to a subsequent session and we began that day by creating squishies under her instruction. Cristina was one of the more reserved members of the group. However, similar to students in Hohti’s (2016) study, this coming together in our here now of time for sharing, of squishies, of the space of our group and these particular students produced Cristina as a leader. She taught us how to stuff, tape, and decorate squishies. She shared how she created squishies by trying things out; that she preferred to fill them with plastic wrap, but her sister used crumpled paper. All of these methods of inquiry were brought to light when time and space were made for squishies.

Though none of the children spoke of squishies in the facilitated discussions around how they learn about topics of interest, nor included them in collages, it is clear when examining these excerpts of sharing that squishies reveal much about children’s ways of knowing. Through the smushing of different squishies, the conversations about them, and the making of them, the children explored and came to understand squishies. These children as researchers, including the breadth and diversity of their experiences, are produced through these intra-actions.

At first, what Billie adds at the end of her share seems a non sequitur, unrelated to both squishies and my interest in children’s research practices. However, when put into context of all of her sharing, it illustrates the significance of knitted times for understanding children’s ways of inquiring. During a previous week, Billie brought in several photos to share with the group, of her as a baby and a young child when she lived in California and her relatives there, and of a cousin, and an aunt who live close to her now. It was clear that these family members and her experiences living in another state and another house are important parts of her life, not just as past encounters, but as integral aspects of her present. During an earlier facilitated discussion, she shared her love of writing realistic fiction, reading an excerpt of one of her stories. When asked about her inspiration, she noted how she draws on her life experiences of living in a blended family. Similar to Eva in Orellana and Phoenix’s (2017) study, Billie’s present is thick with these people, places, and experiences and they inform how she explores and makes sense of the world around her.

Drawing on these divergent notions of temporality allowed me to come to understand sharing as significant relational time (Luttrell, 2020) where children were making connections and immersing themselves in each other and their objects. Reimagining sharing time allowed for recognition of the breadth of children’s ways of knowing and the varied ways that they inquire about issues that matter to them.

Constructing and colonizing childhoods

When we begin to think time differently in research with children, the active role researchers’ play in constructing childhoods is revealed. In many instances, the choice for working with children of a certain age (e. g., four-year-olds) or an age range (e. g., tweens) is based on assumptions of what this age represents along a linear timeline, even if the project seeks to challenge such developmental discourses. These assumptions demonstrate how researchers’ experiences as children themselves and as caregivers, educators, and other roles in which they have worked with children influence studies. This echoes scholars in childhood studies who suggest that researchers’ own lived experiences, constructions of childhood, and perceptions about children’s competence impact participation and interpretation of findings (Clark, 2005; Waller and Bitou, 2011). How might researchers view a participant as the child “who could be me” (Yngvesson, 2013: 358) and how does this shape how they interact with that child and what they assume to know about them? In some cases, researchers’ identities with their racialized, gendered, and classed positionalities can eclipse the identities of child participants, narrowing the ways they see, hear, and interpret findings. In other cases, these can provide means of connecting and ways of understanding.

In addition, the ways that researchers engage with participants are shaped by institutional clock time. For those working in schools, research is situated within the daily schedules and yearly calendars of research sites. In this context, children are separated by age, organized into groups based on this developmental marker. In the academy, timelines of projects are influenced by funding cycles and pressures for publishing. In all of these ways, the childhoods that studies produce are (at least in part) a result of dominant orientations toward linear time.

This universal linear time excludes childhoods that deviate from dominant notions of development, ignoring intersectional identities. As scholars like Yngvesson (2013), Rübner Jørgensen (2017), and Orellana and Phoenix (2017) highlight, the lived experiences of transnational children are often not considered in practices that seek to erase the past, ignoring the knitted times in which children live. In order to acknowledge and value the wealth of resources and knowledges of non-dominant childhoods, researchers must queer time, resisting dominant linear notions and recognizing the width of children’s experiences. This has implications for the types of questions asked and the directions projects can take.

Resisting the pull of clock time

The ticking of the clock draws us to its beat, and researchers must take conscious steps to notice how it influences choices within work with children. Even after I realized how I was framing sharing time as unproductive, I caught myself continuing to wonder about time being wasted. Our research group went online once the pandemic began and, despite being out of the school building and away from its schedules, I still felt the pull of clock time.

For the first ten or so minutes, it was just Paul, and I was feeling really unsure about what to do. Do we keep going with just him? Do I shorten the group? He did not mind at all and said, “Let’s talk about roller coasters again!” and proceeded to tell us all about the roller coasters he has been on and ones he wants to go on…I found myself watching the clock, wondering when to stop him and move on to the other activities for the day (field note, 29 May 2020).

My framing of sharing as unproductive is an example of colonizing children’s time. My focus on productivity resulted not only from watching the clock during our one-hour sessions, but also from a perceived pressure to produce something for the teachers, the administrators, and the families. This was my adult perspective, as a researcher and former educator, equating production with progress. The children did not ask these questions of me, they did not wonder when we would do something. They were excited about the time together and about hearing from friends how they explored; they were always doing something.

Like the young people in Luttrell’s (2020) study, the children in the group prioritized being-in-time with each another. Similarly, children, like those in the studies of Orellana and Phoenix (2017) and Rübner Jørgensen (2017), develop familial networks of care that they tap into when navigating a new country or helping family members as language brokers. This relational time, when placed alongside the clock time that pulses through studies, complicates notions of childhoods, recognizing the breadth of experiences, and significance of connections.

Thinking with time, space, and materiality together

Expanding the ways temporality is thought of in research with children brings to the light the interconnections between time, space, and materiality. When these interwoven approaches to projects and data are taken up, researchers resist representing childhoods as universal. Thinking with time alongside space and matter broadens what researchers can imagine childhoods to be. In both my research and Hohti’s (2016) study, when these components were considered simultaneously, participants were positioned differently, resisting a singular narrative of any childhood. When researchers are attuned to how individual children are immersed in experiences, emotions, and connections and the ways they are expanding through these, they become aware not only of the variations among childhoods that exist but also the multiplicity within any one childhood.

Moving towards tangled, sideways research

As we experience time in new ways amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic, this space of dissonance can support researchers in unsettling temporality in work with children. Coming in and out of lockdowns, we realize that clock time is not the only time. Scholars have begun to discuss the significance of pandemic time and the opportunity it offers to think time differently alongside children. Crinall and Blom wrote together with their children, Edith and Xanthia, during the pandemic, creating a Crinall–Blom family thread.

“You mentioned meaningless of time

This meaningless of time disrupts the adult-child binary, positioning children alongside adults in inquiries and creating a “nurturing learning space” (Crinall et al., 2020: 71). As home, school, and research spaces blur together during pandemic time, who and where we are and with whom and where we research manifest differently. When I consider my positionalities as an adult–child and mother–researcher within our shared space at home during lockdown, I notice the impact of my own children’s wonderings about my research and how their insights and critiques shaped my work with the group.

This unsettling of time can support a shift away from a discourse of childhood as solely becoming. Instead of framing time or learning as lost during the pandemic, researchers working alongside children can explore the multiple and diverse ways children have grown sideways, growth not measured by linear progressions or standardized assessments. Foregrounding these ways of growing disrupts deficit narratives, of particular significance for children from non-dominant groups.

Tangled, sideways research opens new possibilities for being with and learning from children in research. Scholars committed to challenging the universalizing of childhood have a responsibility to reimagine temporality within their projects.