Living Through Fieldwork Duration: Rhythm as Temporal Apparatus

Introduction: Methodological Ruptures

Time in research methodologies is often assumed to be transparently representable, and bodies are thought to exist within time. In this paper, we trouble conventional notions of both temporality and embodiment, and that both can be represented transparently and as separate from the research “field.” For Bergson (1991), scientific time is spatialized—laid out in front of us like a map. But lived time, or duration, unlike scientific time, cannot be laid out in front of us. Instead, we live through it, mired in its passing. Drawing on the work of Bergson, Campt, Kirby, Manning, Phillips, and others, we offer this work as a collective, thinking fieldwork, the body, and time at/in/of particular spacetime(s).

Following a discussion of Bergson’s critique of scientific temporality through to fieldwork in research, this paper develops the concept of fieldwork duration. We argue that the political economies around fieldwork research and the academic-industrial complex seek to regimentalize the field and our (researchers’) time in it. Like other scientific temporalities, “fieldwork-time” thus becomes an abstract space. It supplants researchers, bodies, subjects, environments, to elsewhere, where and when the field is, that is, if we can even continue to claim the discrete existence of “the field.” Using a series of vignettes that serve as activations, we “plug in” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023) to an emergent research “field” that becomes, performs, and incites. This research field is punctuated by rhythms (Jackson, 2016) that cut together/apart (Barad, 2007) seemingly disparate spacetimes that constitute a fieldwork duration. In this way, rhythm comes to act as a conjoining temporal “apparatus” (Barad, 2007, p. 148). We also suggest that some readers may decide to read this paper out of “time order”—that is, if skipping to the vignettes below first is helpful to ground the discussion of fieldwork durations, or if skimming and/or starting elsewhere in the paper makes it more comprehensible, we invite readers to read in the order that makes sense for them.

Our conceptualization of fieldwork duration is somewhat like Wang’s (2010) conceptualization of time in currere, or curriculum studies. Wang states,

Time in currere works recursively rather than linearly. Attending to both the past and the future frees the present rather than fixes it towards a predetermined goal. The flow of time within the past or within the envisioned future, following a free associative mode, is also nonlinear as the blending of different time periods in memory and vision often occurs. Paradoxically, free association enables internal connections between different times. (p. 283)

We similarly suggest that fieldwork-time enacts an engagement of “deep time” ¹ (Zen, 2001) in qualitative research, often involving entanglements, not only with a “past,” or “pasts,” but with seemingly temporally disparate occurrences that co-occupy an immanent space of thought. These happenings make apparent the four-dimensional nature of the “research field” as well as our (researchers’) collective becoming-embodiment through it. In so doing, we draw on the work of scholars such as Springgay and Truman (2019), who discuss speculative temporalities as queer temporalities where pasts, presents, and futures “touch one another . . . every level of touch is touched by all possible others” (p. 549). We put the work of Bergson, Springgay, and Truman in contact—in touch—with readings of Campt, Kirby, and Phillips that help us to plug into a rhythmic temporal becoming punctuated by research vignettes that create a “haptic” (Campt, 2017) plugging into—an opening up—of fieldwork duration that both centers and enacts non-linear temporalities.

Rhythmic Temporal Contiguities

To trouble conventional notions of temporality in fieldwork, we differentiate temporal rhythm from temporal meter. Extending the insights of Jackson’s (2016) work, we understand meter as regular to the point of being static:

Think of a set metronome, a steady ticking of a clock, an annoying tapping of a pen on a desk—these are metered or measured movements and sounds, isolated and homogenous.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology, however, meter is not rhythmic. In contrast to meter, rhythm connects milieus and is about becoming. Rhythm is in the in-between space—the intermilieu where difference is generated. (p. 5)

Meter, in other words, is a linearized becoming of temporality. Rhythm, in contrast, is non-linear and irregular, and relational. In the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari, rhythm, unlike meter, is not about punctuating a homogeneous spacetime at even intervals. Rhythm is interstitial and connective of non-homogeneous spacetimes and generates ontological difference. Jackson (2016) goes on, “Rhythm is both temporally inexact and directional” (p. 5). It is directional in its connectivities, but inexact in its irregularity. We therefore conceive of fieldwork durations as connected rhythmic temporal generations, becomings of difference that build on/with one another and simultaneously connect seemingly disparate research spacetimes that may seem unconnected, irregular, or far apart when spacetime is linearized. But these seemingly disparate spacetimes may, in a research field, become contiguous—they touch in immanent fields of becoming. Once again, if the reader would benefit from a concrete example, we suggest skipping ahead to the vignettes.

Thinking of disparate spacetimes as touching requires a different thinking of time. We first turn our attention to Bergson’s (1991) Matter and Memory. Bergson (1991) argued that memory—pure memory, as past—is different in kind, not degree, from perception in the present. The past passes, but it passes from perception, not from ontological existence. If the difference between perception and recollection (memory)—and by extension time—is in kind, not merely degree, then what Bergson calls, variously, spirit or collective memory or pure memory goes far beyond that which informs present action in perception. Pure memory is ontologically real but not perceptible or not accessible via perception. On the contrary, perception, Bergson states, in practice [as opposed to in principle or “pure” perception], is always tainted with memory, and therefore while pure perception is actual and pure memory is virtual, they are immanent to one another in a flattened temporal ontology.

To give a more concrete analogy, one might think of pure memory as underground sources of water that exist on the earth—unseen and inaccessible reservoirs of groundwater. Pure perception might be thought of as the earth’s atmosphere, which touches the surface of the earth as it moves. The earth’s surface might represent that which is perceived moment to moment. And the earth’s atmosphere (perception) always has some degree of humidity—moisture (recollection)—in it. Yet, large reservoirs of groundwater (pure memory) exist outside of the access of the surface atmosphere (perception). Humidity (recollection), borne by the atmosphere (perception), helps to shape the earth and its land masses, and land masses, in turn, also shape the flow of wind (perception). Groundwater (pure memory) may once have been humidity in the atmosphere but has seeped out of the realm that the atmosphere (perception) can now touch. But groundwater still very much exists. And, it may nonetheless shape the earth’s surface in subtle and ongoing ways. And all elements—humidity, groundwater, earth’s surface, the atmosphere, and even the magma core—ultimately exist as part of one planet (one flattened ontology).

This flattened temporal ontology that Bergson develops includes his concept of duration, which he defines as follows:

The flow is continuous and . . . we pass insensibly from one state to another: a continuity which is really lived, but artificially decomposed for the greater convenience of customary knowledge. Then, [we can see an] action issue from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis, in such a way that we find in this action the antecedents which explain it, while it also adds to these something entirely new, being an advance upon them such as the fruit is upon the flower. (p. 186)

As continuous, temporal duration is a rhythmic movement that enfolds both action and antecedent(s). It is not encountered as points in time, but instead is merely time.

Rhythms are also prominent in Bergson’s conception of time. Rhythms punctuate time; they exist in infinite variety, but each has its own pattern. Each time a rhythm repeats, it is a different repetition of a sameness, and in that sameness, it holds its consistency, its duration. Extrapolating from Bergson, then, we might say that fieldwork durations are also actions sui generis and display their consistency in their rhythms. Sonic rhythms are articulated by sound waves, and research rhythms are constituted by spatio-temporal “lines of articulation” (Mazzei, 2016) that take flight, containing the antecedents in the new.

Furthermore, and importantly, “rhythm is not associated with any living being’s intentionality or control” (Jackson, 2016, p. 5). The research field instead populates us, becomes with us and others, in and with and through researcher-bodies, which are also milieus in processes of becoming. The complex rhythms of the “field” and the “researcher” “intra-act” in the Baradian sense (Barad, 2007), co-constituting interference patterns that may be conceived of as fieldwork durations.

To return to the analogy of the earth, a research duration might, at first glance, look like “weather.” However, weather (movement of the atmosphere over the earth’s surface with greater or lesser degrees of humidity contained in it) also enacts a complex temporal duration. The topographical features that shape the weather have been themselves shaped by previous weather events, and even potentially by groundwater, or what has now become groundwater. As such, the weather is not just “what is happening right now” but is also everything that has happened atmospherically, topographically, etc. to create the “event” that we witness in the present.

Conventional Understandings of the Field

In conventional qualitative research, academic space, domestic space, writing space, and research field are abstract and arbitrary delineations of spacetimes imposed for purposes of convenience, mitigating researcher bias, and regimentalizing labor. These spacetimes, seemingly independent, always located elsewhere, are, however, ontologically part of the same immanent fieldwork duration. Following Bergson, any analysis of duration necessarily spatializes it, as the verb “to analyze” implies a cutting into parts. It “meterizes” something fundamentally rhythmic, to draw back to Jackson’s words. Similarly, when time is conceived of as having periods or moments of discrete passing, when we count it, we spatialize it. We unfold it, lay it out in front of us as a map in abstract Euclidean space. Pure duration, on the contrary, is a qualitative rhythmic multiplicity, immeasurable, non-discrete, and non-quantifiable. The aforementioned abstract spaces, of and around conventional research and the “field,” are then, not impenetrable or a priori, laid out neatly and distinctly in numerical space but perpetually interpenetrating, entangled, and becoming ontological, irrespective of the epistemic imperatives of the academy.

To take another example, in Geertz’s (1973) classic The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz describes ethnography as being “like trying to read . . . a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior” (p. 314). Geertz goes on:

The thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is . . . . The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that in their occurrence and through their agency, is getting said. (p. 315)

Geertz’s project, therefore, is epistemological in nature—a project of knowing and interpreting, not of being. However, episteme always already imports ontology with it. One cannot ask what a thing “means” independent of questions of what it does on the level of ontology. If one is assumed to go out “into a field” to “take notes” and “develop thick descriptions,” then bring them back, to—later in time—interpret them, one’s status and impact as an observer is eschewed; the things gone out to be “looked for” are assumed not to be already the products of interpretations and constellations of events that have already produced a worlding of events and meanings.

Classical anthropological conceptions of ethnography and fieldwork entail two significant acts of abstraction/stratification of immanence/duration; a transcendental ontology which necessitates positions and conditions of “outside” and “inside”; etic or emic; researcher, participant, informant, etc., and the consequent bounding of the “field” in and as distinct spacetime. These acts of abstraction constitute both spacetime(s) and bodies as arborified forms, discrete from each other. Cultures originating elsewhere must be studied by outside researchers through immersion in the field, through the assistance of informants who are inside the culture being studied. Similarly, epistemological concerns deem “translation” and “interpretation” across these thresholds of inside and outside as critical venues that signal the vulnerability of qualitative knowledge production.

Early practitioners of ethnography considered themselves “outside observers,” and despite best efforts at immersive accounts, the work of anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski was received problematically by the people he was describing (Erickson, 2018, p. 92). More recent efforts attempt to mitigate the asymmetrical power relations between the researcher and researched. In more consciously addressing “the personal standpoints, the positionality” of researchers, based on feminist critique (Erickson, 2018, p. 102), techniques such as “participant observation” and “auto-ethnography” came to be. Yet, most of these techniques in qualitative research continue to operate in the domain of epistemology, rather than engaging with ontology seriously.

As a corollary, when conducting fieldwork, the researcher and the researched are transported to a spacetime, governed and bounded by rules of historiography, research ethics, and disciplinary concerns (sociological, political, anthropological, etc.). They are both supplanted from pure duration and emplaced in the “field,” where (and when) practices, behaviors, networks, and environments are instrumentalized for the purpose of documentation. Even in autoethnographic accounts, self-reflections and field notes carry greater weight when documented “during” fieldwork and “in” the field. In this “field,” events are meant to be sequentialized, narrativized, and bounded, such that descriptions of other phenomena around the subject(s) of study can become context or background. Matters of “scope,” quantities of data collected (interviews, etc.), and enumeration of variables necessitate a before-and-after of the study and detract from the entangled, non-discrete nature of emergent phenomena and their study.

Bergson: Temporal Invocations

Bergson (1991) directly critiques a static conception of scientific time as linear and homogeneous, a consistent background against which “things” can be measured:

Imaginary and homogenous time is . . . an idol of language, a fiction whose origin is easy to discover. In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness . . . . To conceive of durations of different tensions is perhaps both difficult and strange to our mind, because we have acquired the useful habit of substituting for the true duration, lived by consciousness, an homogeneous and independent Time. (p. 207)

This “independent Time,” as Bergson calls it, is taken for granted in traditional qualitative fieldwork research. It is what we seek to counter in social science research conceptions of “field.” Research fundamentally involves invocations of time—somewhat akin to invocations of demons or spirits—which are intentional acts with uncertain and unpredictable outcomes. Yet, just as invoking a spirit or demon is aimed at what we hope will be a favorable outcome with at least rough contours that we anticipate, the act of invoking a fieldwork duration constitutes the rough contours of its field. Thus, it is not just that researchers’ positionalities impact the questions asked and the data collected; research durations invoke both researchers and studies.

To reiterate, traditional humanist qualitative research takes time as a given, as a linear, progressive backdrop against which things happen. Time itself is not “the thing,” or the foreground, of traditional humanist inquiry in the Western tradition. Jackson and Mazzei (2023) have written elsewhere that when expression makes itself felt via ontological writing, “what is foregrounded in this worlding are emergent forces that overlap in nonlinear spacetime” (p. 139). We contend that time’s time has come; that spacetimes are becoming entangled with other becomings in our inquiry processes; that research “fields” are non-linear spacetimes that overlap, enfold, entangle, and take off “from the middle” according to rhythmic durations, as so much postqualitative inquiry (e.g., Springgay & Truman, 2019) has already expressed.

A personal thought therefore invokes an entire field and is not initiated or substantiated only by/in a singular body. Thought, like movement, bodies (Manning, 2013), and bodying, is a spatio-temporal joining of past(s) and present(s). Duration, then, is a proximitizing of spacetimes. Yet, even the wording here is rather deceptive. Proximity construes space as a static background to time. It is difficult to find metaphors in English that do not reify space as a priori to time or vice versa. Entanglement may get closer, yet even the colloquial usage of entanglement implies entanglement of things already in existence. Barad’s (2007) term “intra-action”, if applied here to spacetimes that do not exist statically or a priori, is more accurate. Seemingly disparate spacetimes intra-act in the bodying of a fieldwork duration—a pre-personal, pre-individual bodying. As Bergson describes the movement of perception and memory, with memory touching and recomposing the past as it reaches back to reach forward via perception in a body in a present (and the indefinite articles are important here), the past and future are not fixed; ontology itself is movement, and what the past was, changes as it moves via perception with a future that also lures and draws forth.

Rather than continuing a critique of conventional practices and understandings of time in fieldwork that are limiting or providing a redefinition of received notions and practices, this paper attempts an ontological re(con)figuring of “time” and “the field” as fieldwork durations that are unbounded, not spatialized or linearized. Again, following Jackson (2017), “[Traditional] qualitative inquiry puts method before thought, and is thus shot through with dogmatic images to which we are to conform” (p. 674). Time as linear and as outside of the research field is one such dogmatic image. To put time in fieldwork sous rature and plug into fieldwork durations, we briefly call attention to how the field has been understood in traditional humanist qualitative inquiry, including anthropological and educational ethnography. In so doing, we participate in an ongoing call to take ontology seriously across the social sciences.

Method: Constraints and Openings

We begin in the midst, “putting thought in motion” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2024, p. 3). Like Jackson and Mazzei, we agree that deconstructive critiques have made apparent the normative privileging brought about by exclusions. We seek not a mere critique of the way in which existing knowledge limits or constrains new thought, as tethered to traditional approaches to inquiry (p. 2). We instead follow the assertion that to generate the unthought, approaches “ushering in a shift from critique or deconstruction—to creation” are vital (p. 2).

In this spirit, we have no main interest in critiquing or deconstructing “time,” or “the field,” or embodiment, but instead mention these to urge conceptualizing fieldwork duration to account for a reality that is not bounded, not fixed, not separated into a linear past/present/future, nor geographies that are kept apart as the “field,” academia, or domestic space. Jackson (2017), inspired by Deleuze, discusses a dogmatic image of thought as “machinic” (p. 668). “It produces certain predetermined goals and ends.” Thought without image, however, is like “a weed growing between the cracks in the paving stones” (p. 668). In this way, we hope that the thought in this paper is “weedy.”

In what follows, we bring in vignettes from two authors, MaryJohn and Manas, interspersed with the rest of our conceptual writing, to achieve two purposes. First, we attempt to illustrate fieldwork duration via these vignettes. We set them off from the main text in a different typographical font to emphasize their potential to produce difference in and via this text. Second, we invite readers to pay attention to the temporal and affective connectives that emerge in the interstices—the “cracks in the paving stones”—between the paper’s main text and the text of the vignettes. In so doing, we attempt to enact “thought in the act” (Manning & Massumi, 2014) and fieldwork duration, not merely to describe them. Furthermore, in refusing to make all possible connectives overt and explicit, we offer the reader the opportunity to produce new pluggings-in among the vignettes and the sections that follow them (concerning the work of Kirby, Campt, Phillips, and Manning). We invite the reader to think with the vignettes, the following sections, and their own fieldwork durations. And it may be worth mentioning, the vignettes were actually the “first” parts of this paper that were written—the rest was written from and around them (but only if we linearize time—so, this is only a truth in a [very] partial sense).

VIGNETTE: MaryJohn

Prostheses indicate the porous relations between the inside and the outside of the living subject, between an open-ended biology that has remarkable capacities to incorporate into its organic functions all kinds of artificial or cultural inventions and the things in the world which function otherwise through the living subject’s intervention. (Grosz, 2005, p. 9)

Technology is metaproduction: the production of things to produce things, a second-order production. Technology is, in a sense, the inevitable result of the encounter between life and matter, life and things, the consequence of the living’s capacity to utilize the nonliving (and the living) prosthetically. (Grosz, 2005, p. 137)

This bodyless organ the email. Not mine as in “my email,” but email as bodily prosthesis of becoming-researcher-bodies. A sampling of first lines from my inbox:

“Yep! We got it. We’ll let you know . . .”

“Community of practice now OPEN.”

“Thank you. I’ll wait to hear . . .”

“Funding announcements and solicitations . . .”

“Would 4:40 work for you? Thanks.”

“Sent on behalf of . . .”

“Be the first to apply. We have found 1 new . . .”

“Dear CSCM production team, I am the corresponding . . .”

“Hello, for AERA this year we will be creating . . .”

“Hi, I’m so sorry, I had a 48-hour turnaround . . .”

This sampling of email first lines from sometime during winter 2022–2023 emerged as an entry point to this writing. It seemed appropriate to “begin in the middle.” That winter, I was in the middle of my dissertation “fieldwork,” yet it had already begun a thousand times over—in my master’s thesis work while I was a student at the University of British Columbia, in my 10 years teaching in South Carolina K–12 classrooms, in books I read in the interstices of becoming teacher-researcher-participant in my own “fieldwork,” in the many vignettes teachers shared and would come to share with me as a colleague and as a “researcher” in the coming months. But email was where so many connectives were already alive, already happening, already pulling together people and pasts and histories and schedules and futures and questions and bodies and lands and more.

If becoming-questions become retroactively, a becoming-question—how does email as bodily prosthesis impact the temporality and temporal rhythms of research?—emerges. This is not a question for analysis; a methodological impulse to code and theme still emerges in a becoming-striation alongside the question. It would be too easy to code my emails’ first lines for temporal urgency here.

Maybe this talking of my email isn’t very interesting, or maybe it’s difficult to explore and articulate a plane of immanent becoming when one is used to conceptual hierarchies. Jackson and Mazzei (2023) state, “Becoming-questions are movement: they flow in between all the doings of inquiry to produce experimentation and change. Rather than starting and steering inquiry, they are inside thought that actualizes, as it is happening” (p. 7). Where is the body of (a) researcher(s)? Is not the body of researcher always already, as Mol (2003) states, “multiple”? Is not the temporal duration of research already-becoming in the emails that flow: “setting it up,” “choosing times,” and “answering quick questions?” And if these mo(ve)ments become a fieldwork duration in motion, what are the politics and ethics implicated already in email(s) (and other technological prostheses) as researcher-body-research-field-prosthesis? Put perhaps more simply, what do our email doings do?

VIGNETTE: Manas

I could begin to talk about builders’ floors, these curious building types that I study in my doctoral work in architecture, by academically laying out the historical “context” and the policy “background” of their emergence through an episodic recounting of events that follow the seemingly linear development trajectory of private property in Delhi, India:

The vast residential expansion of Delhi in the 1950s through 70s, based on single-family subdivisions, was followed by the subsequent liberalization of India’s economy in the 1990s, leading to the real estate “boom,” allowing people to speculate on their properties, incentivizing the rapid growth and densification of neighborhoods. Subsequently, the 2006 “sealing drive” ² attempted to curb the haphazard growth of residential and commercial properties in the city, only to concretize the role of builders as the only competent agents of bottom-up development. Eventually, the 2011 Parking Stilt Order ³ sought to control the rampant parking crisis in neighborhoods, but in turn incentivized higher levels of vehicle ownership and even more growth.

My dissertation could also draw on the individual accounts of my research participants, where the development of these houses may be narrativized as a sequence of separate instantiations, each pertaining to their own personal and inter-generational histories. For example,

When my parents left Kolkata, they had no property, no home. Renting was the only option . . .

Everyone around us had started to build floors, we felt left behind . . .

I must secure the future for my children. In this city, it is becoming impossible to buy property . . .

It is quite a lucrative venture to collaborate with builders; gives us some liquidity . . .

Conversely, I could also begin the story from the time I stop-started my fieldwork in 2019, 2020, and 2021; except through the fog of the pandemic, I am not sure of the official period of my fieldwork in Delhi. I could start the story from 2011, when my parents’ home, my childhood home, developed structural damage due to the construction of builder floors ⁴ next door. I could even begin to remember my first impressions of builders as ruthless real-estate-grabbing agents, who bought out development rights all around our neighborhood, even when I was a child. Or perhaps, the story starts with speculations about (memories of) the future and the teleological end of this development “trajectory.” About how quaint single-family-home neighborhoods are doomed to densify, grow taller, beyond their infrastructural limits, and eventually perish or become slums under real estate pressures.

It seems to me that each “narrative device” is laid out flat like a temporal map of the subject of my research. Background/context, interview data, personal interest, and all separate strands of my investigation, each pertaining to different spacetimes and “timescales.”

But it is not simply a question of epistemology, an unbiased telling of “real-world” events (even personal experiences) that I “found and documented in the field.” Seemingly disparate events, decisions, and movements share the same spacetime ontologically. The growing presence of builders and their operations in middle-class neighborhoods, my decision to pursue a PhD, the pandemic’s impact on interviews, and the housing predicament of my generation of young professionals in Delhi are all interpenetrating to produce this fieldwork duration. This rhythm-becoming-apparatus cuts across and brings together multiple spacetimes, subjects/objects, and events to form and re-form the body of the field while simultaneously narrativizing or fleshing in my encounters with the field.

Kirby: Lightning

To invoke a research field is a calling-on of an entire field. In physics, a field “is a region of space for which each point is associated with a specific physical quantity” or directional vector (Reny, 2023). For example, a gravitational field is understood as “a region of space where each point is associated with the magnitude and the direction of the gravitational force that is exerted on a mass of 1 kg placed at that point” (Reny, 2023). Gravity depends on the masses of the two objects in question and the square of the distance between them.

However, our conception of fieldwork duration bears more similarity to Vicki Kirby’s (2011) description of fields in Quantum Anthropologies. To illustrate, in describing the behavior of lightning when it strikes the ground, Kirby (2011),

learned that quite curious initiation rites precede these electrical encounters. An intriguing communication, a sort of stuttering chatter between the ground and the sky, appears to anticipate the actual stroke. A quite spectacular example is the phenomenon of St. Elmo’s fire, a visible light show that can sometimes be seen to enliven an object in the moment, just before the moment, of the strike . . . . We might well ask what language drives this electric conversation that seems to get ahead of itself in the final instant (or was it the first instant?) of divine apprehension—“when awareness takes place”? . . . In other words, one lightning stroke, moved by a logic that exceeds its binary forces, can also be seen as a stroke in which an entire field of energy rewrites itself. (pp. 10–12)

Fielding, then, becomes a re-writing, a re-composition of an entire field made of intra-active spacetimes. Fieldwork duration involves the kind of “stuttering chatter” not between ground and sky but between apparently disparate spacetimes. When they intra-act to produce difference, it is like a lightning strike in that “awareness takes place,” driven not by individual consciousness but by “a logic that exceeds [the] binary forces” of researcher-fieldwork.

Campt: Haptic Temporalities

Tina Campt (2017) enacts just this sort of temporal duration in Listening to Images. In exploring archives of photographs of Black people in diaspora, Campt conceptualizes “haptic temporalities”—durations of touching contiguity. As she describes them:

These temporalities include, but are in no way limited to, the moment of photographic capture; the temporality of the photographic re/production of material objects; their assembly and reconfiguration as nodes of state, social, and cultural formation; and the present and future temporalities of their interactions with researchers, archivists, and the broader community. (Campt, 2017, p. 72)

In other words, these temporalities, which we would conventionally call disparate, are ontologically contiguous—touching and haptic. What is significant about Campt’s fieldwork is that her work with photographic archives illustrates a temporal ontology that applies more broadly to fieldwork durations and our engagement with them. When we encounter an event, that “something in the world [which] forces us to think” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, as cited in St. Pierre, 2019, p. 8), the duration of any research event incites an intra-action of events in our personal histories and collective histories, happenstances, reproductions, the movement of memory amid perception and memory-images (in Bergson’s terminology), the movements of reconfigurations of the past and future with/in a present, and the potential and virtual futurities opened up by this particular encounter and which lure or draw this encounter forth. The past becomes different, becomes something else, while the future also both becomes and incites something else in every “moment” of a fieldwork duration. In other words, a fieldwork duration becomes bodied by movement-moving (Manning, 2013), by pre-personal and pre-individual thought that traverses virtual topologies of movement-moving, which incites the “stuttering chatter” of spacetimes across virtual movement and sparks the electricity of the as-yet-unthought to actualization in fieldwork durations.

Phillips: Retrocausality

Phillips’ (2025) work also helps to articulate why conceptualizing fieldwork duration has political and philosophical import. Phillips explains that there is a contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics (that entropy always irreversibly increases) and the principle of time symmetry (that, in theory, any system in the universe should be able to run the same forward and backward in time). In this context, Phillips (2025) states,

This realization opens possibilities for alternative temporal frameworks that could have significant societal and political ramifications. It urges us to envision a world where time is not a rigid, linear progression but a dimension with more fluid and equitable possibilities. Such a reimagining of time could lead to more inclusive and flexible societal structures and political systems, challenging the status quo and offering new ways to conceptualize progress, productivity, and community. (p. 35)

Indeed, the very logics of linear time are entangled with progress narratives (e.g., Manifest Destiny) that have been used to colonize lands, to commit genocides of (particularly Indigenous) peoples, to steal the bodies and labor of kidnapped peoples (e.g., the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation capitalism), and erase or ignore ongoing Indigenous presence (Rifkin, 2017) and survivance (Sabzalian, 2019). Phillips (2025) also asserts,

Thomas Kuhn argues that the structure of scientific revolutions is itself profoundly influenced by scientific narratives that “make the history of science look linear or cumulative.” These conceptions of time are entangled with the legacy of colonialism and of the Eurocentric worldview that has been instrumental in shaping the “empirical” science that often bolsters racist and colonialist narratives of progress and development. (p. 36)

Guided by both quantum physics and Black studies, Phillips explores “retrocausality” (p. 49), or the idea that when spacetimes intra-act, the past can be changed, influenced, and/or re/configured as much as the future(s). In this way, “historical ‘debts’ related to time and freedom” (p. 51) might be addressed not only via financial reparations but also via spatio-temporal reparations. The exact form of such reparations would be yet-to-be determined and would be determined with those to whom the debts are owed. These debts and potential reparations intra-act at the point(s) of spatio-temporal suturing we conventionally call “the present” and at the site(s) of the bod(ies).

Manning: Body

As the conceptual development of this paper acted upon/with us, we noticed that the body kept inserting itself (becoming incited?) in seemingly unavoidable ways. We had temporarily “cut” the concept of the body/bodying from the paper, thinking we would end up trying to cover too much conceptual terrain. Yet, the body has become a rhythm that seems to punctuate and connect this research articulation at unavoidable intervals. The bodying of the field (as in fieldwork durations) and the embodied encounter(s) with the field are both central to the dismantling of conventional, disembodied notions of fieldwork and qualitative research. This rhythm becomes an apparatus that brings together spacetimes, subjects/objects, events, and bodies, to form and re-form the body of the field, while simultaneously narrativizing or fleshing in our encounters with the field.

Manning (2013), inspired by Bergson, Deleuze, and Guattari, differentiates movement from body/bodying. (It is worth quoting here at some length):

Despite appearances, movement is not of a body. It cuts across, co-composing with different velocities of movement-moving. It bodies. The body-as-such is an extraction that appears in the collision of movement-moving and actual movement, a momentary collusion of tendencies that seem to make up a whole. . . . There are an infinity of ways of touching on the more-than that is movement-moving. . . . This quality is a vibration that exists as a movement of thought. Not a thinking that is outside, beyond movement-moving, but a thinking that composes-with movement, with-body-in-the-making. A thinking that defines its own terms, in the moving, that touches on the realm of absolute movement as it co-composes with actual movement . . . . To move is to think-with a bodying in act. (pp. 14–15)

Movement-moving bodies. It actualizes. Manning continues:

In order for the more-than to be felt . . . . it must create a differentiation, an involution, a fold (a fleshing in, as opposed to a fleshing out), a setting-to-rhythm not only of this or that body, but of an ecology in co-composition, an ecology that is not only a recomposition of spacetimes bodying, but also a thinking in act, a movement of thought (p. 15).

Ontologically, then, a topology of movement becomes, and thought traverses movement not attached to a singular a priori subject, not activated by a sole force or actor, but which nonetheless quite materially composes human and other-than-human bodies in historical and un/just durations.

Researching Fieldwork Duration

It is our work, our lives, the lives of those with whom we think and live, the environs that have constituted “us,” that have brought us, collectively, to this consideration of fieldwork duration. In casual conversations with other researchers about the topic of this paper as it came to be, others have expressed how an ontology of fieldwork that takes seriously the co-constitution—the intra-action—of pasts, presents, and futures in fieldwork is needed and is often sensed by/with/around researchers attuned to ontological movement. Whether it is via inter-generational migration, speculative capital, and automobility in Delhi that came together to transform single-family homes into “builder floors” (Manas), the chance meeting of researchers at the American Educational Research Association that led to the publication of multiple books and many more articles that have influenced a “field” (Lisa), or an email inbox aflight with conversations about anti-racist teaching to be scheduled, entangling many past conversations, teaching experiences, and the lands on which all of these took and take place (MaryJohn), fieldwork duration becomes non-linear, non-discrete, and intra-active.

We have presented an enactment generating a movement of thought around/through/with “the field,” “time,” “research,” and “researchers.” We think with the movement of spacetimes and concepts that generate fieldwork duration as potentially furthering temporal justice in qualitative research. Not being tethered to our received notions of the concepts in play has enabled us to enact different practices in, through, and with spacetimemattering (Barad, 2010). In a sociopolitical and affective moment where, often, time seems scarce, bounded, urgent, and out of joint, even while it is linearized and compressed by calendar blocking, the urgency of global warming, and much else, thinking with fieldwork duration potentially opens time in fieldwork differently to ancestral wisdom and to future alterity. It implores us to pay attention to the immediacy of perception and memory, to allow ourselves to be haunted by our future pasts. While there is no guarantee that such thinking-movement will generate justice, we hope that this conceptualization will support the work of many who have continued to insist on the legitimacy of knowledge and worldings other than what has been ostensibly—and often unjustly—given, particularly in White, Western academic research. Conceptualizing fieldwork duration as developed in this paper attempts to honor histories not only present but also that are the present, the ways in which futures enfold and reconfigure pasts, and the ways in which justice might be done with bodies and lands past-present-future—and more.