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

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.