Multiverse,Feminist Materialist Relational Time,and Multiple Future(s): (Re)configuring Possibilities for Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Critical feminist materialist theorizing opens up possibilities for enacting different ways of knowledge making. In this article, I connect feminist materialist inquiry with time and temporality to develop a line of inquiry to reimagine the nature of multiple future(s). Employing theorizing developed by Francesca Ferrando, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway, and thinking with the concepts of Multiverse, spacetimemattering, and agential cuts, I develop the concept of feminist materialist relational time as a methodological possibility for inquiry. Using examples from my own and others’ scholarship, I propose that feminist materialist relational time articulates ways in which affirmative and transversal ethico-onto-epistemologies can reconsider power, mattering, enactment, and exclusions, creating multiple future(s) for qualitative inquiry. I argue that the entanglement of past/present/future as events and forces in flux highlights the multiplicity of temporality where past/present/future are now, then, immanent, processual, always already in the making, and formed of intra-acting bodies.

Introduction . . . or Not . . . Maybe This Is an Entry Point

As I have developed my thinking on feminist materialism, I have pondered the idea of time and temporality and what this might mean for qualitative inquiry. I have been thinking with feminist materialism and agential realism for many years and had already been problematizing linearity from a methodological perspective both in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and in undisciplined and indisciplined inquiry (Fairchild, 2016, 2021; Fairchild et al., 2022). This led me to consider alternative ways to articulate ontic notions of time and temporality and to entangle these with feminist materialist methodologies and theory–praxis. Taking a more transdisciplinary approach to theory methodology and practice (see Taylor et al., 2020), I was keen to focus on (re)configuring time and temporality and what this might mean for past/present/future(s) of qualitative inquiry. As I did so, this comment by Donna Haraway resonated with me:

One of the key meanings of “decolonizing time” is a coming to inhabit multiple temporalities, coming to inhabit enfolded and entangled times that are ontologically complex—a kind of being slow to come to ontological conclusions, a kind of slowing down of category work, so as to open up the contact zones of thinking. (Haraway, 2017, n.p.)

The concepts of time and temporarily are intimately connected with qualitative inquiry as “time permeates everything: it is implicated in being and becoming, in experience, knowledge and communication” (Adams, 1992, p. 6). The ontic nature of time is “normally associated with an objective state (i.e., Newtonian clock time or linear time)” (Ho, 2021, p. 1), which can be measured and quantified (Gore et al., 2021). Temporality is the dominant social understanding of the qualitative nature of time in humanities, cultural studies, education, and social sciences (Gore et al., 2021), and refers “to the way periods of time (for example, the ongoing present) connect and relate to other periods in a backward (past) and forward (future) direction” (Dawson, 2014, p. 286). In inquiry, qualitative methodologies and methods are traditionally designed to “capture” or “highlight” phenomena where “temporal factors inform the events under investigation” (Sandelowski, 1999, p. 79) with, for example, narrative methods focusing on past recollections and “organisations of time and space as their object of study” (Koro-Ljungberg & Hendricks, 2018, p. 1196).

In their edited collection, Norman Denzin and Michael Giardina (2019b) start to open up the contact zones of thinking that Donna Haraway (2017) encourages from researchers. Although critical qualitative inquiry has played an important role in challenging universal truths (Cannella, 2015), Denzin and Giardina argue that qualitative inquiry is at a crossroads beset with skepticism about its value, rigor, and reliability where “a litany of familiar criticisms circulate both inside and outside academia” (Denzin & Giardina, 2019b, p. 5). Future(s) for inquiry have been confounded by dominant right-wing populist discourses that, globally, have reinstated and inflected a new “culture war” on research and scholarship. Within this milieu, it is possible to reimagine other possible futures where critical inquiry becomes “first and foremost an intervention, an act that is never neutral and always directed towards a particular end” (Wells et al., 2021, p. xiv, emphasis in original), driven by ethics and social responsibility. Part of the commitment to intervention is a need for the researcher to account for situated knowledges that move beyond scientific objectivity to an understanding that all knowledge comes from particular locations and conceptualizations (Haraway, 1988). Situated knowledges are not time sensitive: they are partial, relational, and immanent, revealing the multiple possibilities and opportunities for inquiry that acknowledge positionality and refute ossification of methods and methodologies.

In these challenging times, an exploration of what qualitative future(s) might look like is a pressing need to provide “conceptual opportunities to reconfigure . . . conventional norms and values . . . of enacted habit on ontological and epistemological levels” (Kuntz, 2019, p. 126). Drawing on present articulations of qualitative inquiry, and taking up Maggie MacLure’s (2015) call for researchers to adopt an immanent, transversal, and affirmative mode of critique, this article contributes to discussions about the future(s) of qualitative inquiry. I do this by considering how time and temporality are interconnected with inquiry, and how feminist materialist theorizing can offer a methodological theory–praxis to (re)configure our understandings of inquiry that are entangled in social and material words. By developing a line of argument for feminist materialist relational time, I provide an instantiation of how feminist materialist research can methodologically offer alternative notions of relations, space, time, and bodies. I argue that feminist materialist relational time can provide ways to understand the multiple flows of power in macrostructures and how these affect bodies in and through assemblages, providing possible alternative future(s) that can act as a site of resistance. Initially, I will explore theorizations and methodologies that make up feminist materialist theory–praxis. Then, drawing on theorizations from Francesca Ferrando (2019) and Karen Barad (2007, 2014, 2017), I consider alternative dimensions of time and temporality. The next section puts these concepts to work (A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) and I provide examples of how feminist materialist scholarship and attention to time and temporality can be used to (re)configure current understandings of inquiry. In concluding this article, I illuminate how the concept of feminist materialist relational time provides a rethinking of time and temporality and what this offers for alternative perspectives for inquiry. I argue that attention to feminist materialist inquiry can provide alternative visions of future(s) that are affirmative, situated, and relational, highlighting material, social, and discursive events and entanglements in the world.

Feminist Materialist Inquiry

Feminist materialist inquiry is concerned with a connected worldview that is local and situated (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Coole & Frost, 2010; Haraway, 1988), considering how microstructures are affected by, and can flourish in, macrostructures (Fairchild et al., 2022; Taylor, 2021). In doing so, feminist materialist inquiry as theory–praxis generates possibilities for thinking about different and multiple future(s) for qualitative inquiry by considering the theoretical nature of relational time. Feminist materialist research is part of the lineage of critical qualitative inquiry where theory has been used to challenge, problematize, and unpick power, discourse, and identity to provide alternative understandings of the ways power circulated and how different modes of thought could be more transformative and liberating (Denzin & Giardina, 2019a).

In the 1990s, critical research took a different turn and a “new” metaphysics emerged. New materialism has become popular as a theoretical orientation that “does not privilege matter over meaning or culture over nature” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 85). Scholars engaging with new materialism work on the premise that life is always already relational and that this relationality includes humans, nonhumans (matter and objects), and other-than-humans (living things—animals and biota) (Coole & Frost, 2010; Fairchild et al., 2022). More recently, feminist new materialist theorizing (or new material feminisms) has emerged as a way to take into consideration the intersectional “patterns of marginalization encompassing race, gender, sexuality, age, socioeconomic class, dis/ability and nationality” (Truman, 2019, p. 10), and how this affects culture, society, and materiality (Taylor, 2021; Taylor & Fairchild, 2020). A number of philosophers, scholars, researchers, and diverse modes of thought have been brought together under the neologism of new materialisms; however, it should be acknowledged that nothing is ever “new” as Black and Indigenous scholars have focused on relationality and animism for millennia (see Bhattacharya, 2021; Todd, 2016; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). In the remainder of the article, I acknowledge the history of relational epistemologies and ontologies, and that the idea that “newness” needs to be critically explored. In recognition of this, I employ the term “feminist materialism” to explore theory–praxis generated in the doing of inquiry.

The Development of Feminist Materialist Theory–Praxis

Feminist materialist theory–praxis focuses on both thinking and doing; it is concerned with putting theory to work (A. Y. Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) to produce new insights that are connected and relational. These theories are not bounded by discipline specificity and transdisciplinary feminist inquiry allows for a questioning of what “counts” as knowledge, who is included or excluded in knowledge making, and how this knowledge is produced. In this way, it can engage with macro systems, for example, intersectional issues, climate change and sustainability, the challenges of living in unequal societies, and consider how these become materialized in micro-processes and micro-moments of becoming (see the work of Bozalek et al., 2018; Fairchild, 2021; Malone et al., 2020; Murris, 2016; Osgood & Robinson, 2019; Taylor & Bayley, 2019; Taylor et al., 2020 for transdisciplinary approaches to education). What this theory–praxis provides is a fundamental shift in conceptions of the interrelatedness of ontology, epistemology, ethics, time, and the importance of materiality (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Ferrando, 2019).

Research that is inflected with feminist materialism reframes the relationship between the researcher and the researched (the subject and the object) and, although not following any preset methodological format, inquiry retheorizes the subject and subjectivity in relation with other bodies ¹ (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008). Here, agency is not a property solely connected to individuals; it is a performative enactment that happens when bodies are in relation revealing structures of power and also affirmative possibilities for different ways of living (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013). There have been critiques that the dissolved notions of agency and subject/subjectivity do not effectively address those communities and individuals who have always been marginalized (see Ahmed, 2008; Bhattacharya, 2020, 2021; Chakravorty Spivak, 1993; Z. I. Jackson, 2015; Jones & Hoskins, 2016; Todd, 2016; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, for further articulation of these debates ² ). It is important that scholars working with a critical feminist materialist perspective are aware of the lineages and inheritances they owe scholars and communities that have gone before (King, 2017). Taking a response-able (Haraway, 2008) approach and acknowledging positionality (Braidotti, 2013) and citation politics (Ahmed, 2012) can be a starting point for understanding the epistemic violence and erasure that have occurred, and are still occurring.

A refocusing on relationality also had profound effects on the nature of time and temporality in inquiry. Although time may be experienced in the similar linear way, that is, the past is before the now and the future is yet to come, the outcomes of these experiences are neither equal nor neutral. Time and temporality are political and experienced differently; they shape both human, natural, and geological processes, and carry raced, gendered, and classed assumptions (Yusoff, 2018). These epistemological positions of time and temporality reflect the separation of the subject and object where the “object of study” is viewed from an external position and where certain realities, not others, become materialized within the research process (Kuntz, 2019). This has an impact for critical qualitative inquiry where possible futures are entangled with the pasts and presents of historical and contemporary thought.

Moving beyond subject/object dualisms and ontic notions of time and temporality allows for a reframing of research practices that account for the entangled nature of inquiry. In this way, feminist materialism is a theory–praxis where knowledge is not separate from the knower, where theory is not static, outside of and applied to research but is intimately entangled in knowledge production, where thinking–doing and experimental practices are a common theme of feminist materialist methodologies (Fairchild et al., 2022). The move away from anthropocentrism, separateness from the world, and Eurocentric Enlightenment logics to monism, relationality, and connectivity becomes important as the heritage of Enlightenment thinking is reflected in the language and materiality of the world and acts as a force of marginalization (Braidotti & Bignall, 2019; Snaza & Weaver, 2015; Yusoff, 2018).

Feminist Materialist Methodologies

When research becomes entangled with feminist materialist theories, it is generally entwined with immanent, affective, indisciplined, and speculative methodological approaches. There is no unified set of methodologies or methods for feminist materialist inquiry as methodologies are connected and relational in nature. They open up possibilities for enacting different ways of knowledge making that are geopolitically informed and contest humanist understandings of relations, space, time, bodies, position, and power (Fairchild et al., 2022). Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman (2018) propose that existing methods need not be refused but that “research methods cannot be framed as a process of gathering data” (p. 204) and I have argued that “new methods may not be required but what is required is an openness to new ways of activating and thinking methods to explore the flows within and between assemblages” (Fairchild, 2016, p. 26, emphasis in original). It is also important to consider what data are and become in feminist materialist inquiry. Mirka Koro-Ljungberg et al. (2017) question and problematize the nature of data and encourage us to pay “close attention to data and their numerous variations and manifestations” (p. 2) and to “data’s relationality, movement, entanglements or multidirectional epistemological flows” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016, p. 46) and how this might help us to move beyond traditional notions of data analysis and coding.

Scholars have proposed methodologies, such as post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2011, 2016), research-creation (Manning, 2016; Manning & Massumi, 2014), cartography (Kuntz, 2019; Rantala, 2019), and undisciplined/indisciplined inquiry (Fairchild et al., 2022; Truman, 2022) to consider empirical ways to research with the “posts.” “Transversality” was a term coined by Felix Guattari (1984) as an a-hierarchical approach to connection and the becoming of bodies. Research and inquiry from a feminist materialist perspective is both transversal and transdisciplinary (Taylor et al., 2020). It opens up new possibilities for methodologies and methods that highlight the entanglements of matter and materiality between human, nonhumans, and other-than-humans (Murris, 2021), and reveals how discourse and mattering are co-implicated in knowledge production (Truman, 2022). In this type of inquiry, the relationship between the researcher and the researched and the subject and object are equally as entangled. Karen Barad’s (2007) metaphysics of ethico-onto-epistemology highlights that “practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world” (p. 185); in this conception, the researcher is not a priori to the research they are co-implicated in the research process. An ethico-onto-epistemology offers novel perspectives on relations, space, time, and bodies, which reveal a range of possible alternative future(s).

Alternative Dimensions of Time and Temporality

It is interesting to note that, although there is a viewpoint that time is fixed, linear, ontic, and can be represented, there are alternative perspectives from both social and natural sciences (Barad, 2007; Ferrando, 2019). These alternative perspectives are based on theoretical understandings of the complexity of time where posthumanist, new materialist, and feminist materialist theory–praxis are put to work to reconceptualize time and its influence. They offer new possibilities for thinking about different and multiple future(s) for qualitative inquiry, by considering the theoretical nature of relational time and its impact on relations, space, time, and bodies that can reveal sites of resistance in inquiry. There are also experimental and conceptual works based on quantum physics, which have reframed notions of matter and materiality, subject and object, and conceptions of the relationality of time, space, and matter. This section of the article will develop a line of inquiry that traces a number of key concepts linked to time and temporality, notably Multiverse, spacetimemattering, and agential cuts.

Francesca Ferrando’s (2019) book Philosophical Posthumanism provides a genealogy of the variety of posthuman thought, and its transdisciplinary nature, through a breadth of philosophical positions. She deconstructs and reconstructs the wider conditions for posthumanist thinking and, in doing so, highlights the plurality of multiple concepts that make up the philosophical, theoretical, and empirical nature of inquiry that employs posthumanist, new materialist, and feminist materialist theory. One of the starting points for this work is non-dualistic modes of thought that do not draw binary distinctions between different modes of living, for example, nature and culture. There is also an acknowledgment of how matter and bodies are always already in relation with each other, and that bodies are not a priori but come into being as part of this relationality. This perspective already has an impact on ontic time and its focus on linear presentations of time; if bodies only come into being as part of a relational event, we cannot presume existence before the event coalesces and how/what bodies might become as events continue to produce connections with other bodies.

To reconcile some of these questions, Ferrando (2019) draws on theoretical quantum physics and string theory. She uses these to refute subject–object dualisms to support the theory that matter cannot be reduced to a single entity. Here objects/bodies and entities come into being through vibrating strings that form subatomic particles. The production of entities is determined by the ways these strings vibrate and connect with each other. ³ She then links these ontological perspectives with the notion of the Multiverse, which was formulated by cosmologists and physicists, being hypothetical rather than experimental. There are four key levels of Multiverse theory: the expansion of the universe can result in the possibility for exact copies of alternative duplicate worlds and works on the premise that numerous universes can exist simultaneously; that the “Big Bang” could have produced one of many universes all operating independently; that there are “many worlds” (i.e., parallel universes), where “a specific event could create a branch point and the consequence of different quantum outcomes” (Ferrando, 2019, p. 173); and that there are different universes and each one is based on a different set of mathematical structures and laws of physics.

The possibility of the Multiverse offers alternative conceptual and theoretical perspectives for inquiry. The different levels of Multiverse theory offer the possibility for multiple ways to think about inquiry. Each articulation of the Multiverse is a potentially different entanglement of past, present, and futures, which holds alternative realities and possibilities for relations, spaces, time, and bodies. Although the Multiverse is a theoretical articulation of time, it details the possibility for multiple “truths” and ways of knowing relations-in-the-world. The notion of the “Multiverse” is not particular to cosmology and physics but also has a history in philosophy with the term being coined by William James (1842–1910) and can be traced in the work of Gottfried Wilhelm van Leibnitz (1646–1716; Ferrando, 2019). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) also note the possibilities for alternative modes of becoming in their work on the virtual and actual. In their conception, the virtual is a plane of immanence where multiple futures are possible, these then become actualized in the realm of the actual through rhizomatic connections as assemblages coalesce and form bodies. Therefore, the final form on view is relational to the components of the assemblage, but, in addition, this form is not fixed but is constantly in flux as rhizomes are machinically connecting to other bodies indefinitely.

Karen Barad (2007) considered where humans might fit into these wider networks of becomings and multiplicities in her theorization of agential realism. She argued that it is impossible to separate epistemology, ontology, and ethics and proposed the metaphysical actualization of ethico-onto-epistemologies. Here, bodies and individuals are formed and are materialized during intra-actions, rather than being seen as essential and bounded (Barad, 2007). These intra-actions occur within phenomena and it is “through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of ‘individuals’ within the phenomenon become determinate and particular material articulations of the world become meaningful” (Kleinmann, 2012, p. 77). Networks of intra-acting phenomena highlight the ways in which humans are in entangled relations with political, social, and material bodies where agency is an enactment and is spread across these entangled relations (Barad, 2007). Barad also theorized the concept of spacetimemattering where “subjects, objects, time and space are continuously unfolding in multiple iterations of possibility becoming phenomena of human and non-human discursive materiality” (Fairchild et al., 2022, p. 22). Spacetimemattering is a multiplicity concerned with

taking account of all possible histories, or rather, spacetimemattering configurings. Crucially, these “possibilities” are not to be thought of in the usual way: the diffraction pattern is not a manifestation of an uncertainty in our knowledge—it is not that each history is merely possible, until we know more and then ultimately only one will be actualized—the superposition marks ontology indeterminacy (not epistemological uncertainty) and the diffraction pattern indicates that each history coexists with the others. (Barad, 2017, p. 68)

Barad also considered how agential cuts produce agential separability through which certain realities (and not others) appear, are materialized, and enacted (Barad, 2014). Different agential cuts offer new potential realities, giving rise to conditions of possibility for some bodies and producing exclusions of/for other bodies (Fairchild & Taylor, 2019). The ethics of the cut are revealed as “It’s all a matter of where we place the cut . . . what is at stake is accountability to marks on bodies in their specificity by attending to how different cuts produce differences that matter” (Barad, 2007, p. 348).

Putting Feminist Materialist Concepts and Inquiry to Work

Thinking with the concepts of Multiverse, spacetimemattering, and agential cuts, and using examples from recent scholarship, I propose ways in which affirmative and transversal ethico-onto-epistemologies can reconsider power, mattering, enactment, and exclusions, creating multiple future(s) for qualitative inquiry. In this section, I highlight the potential of feminist materialist relational time through a series of agential cuts (Barad, 2007) in the research I present. This is not to exclude the breadth of inquiry and scholarship putting feminist materialism to work with time and temporality, but to give a flavor of possible alternative future(s) that can act as sites of resistance from linear definitions of ontic time.

Donna Haraway explored the concept of decolonizing time and argued as follows:

“Decolonizing time” involves the cultivation of the capacity to be still, to listen and not to be self-certain. It is to understand that colonial time might be defined as Plantationocene time, as the time of simplification for the extraction of value, for its distribution in hierarchical ways, coupled with massive genocides of both people and other creatures—the kinds of massive simplifications and displacements that go along with disappearing. (Haraway, 2017, n.p.)

This chimes with the work of Anna Tsing et al. (2017) who note the precarity of ecosystems that have arisen from capitalist and colonialist progress imperatives that have affected our Anthropocene futures. These legacies form macrostructures of power in spacetimemattering that determines the multifaceted and coexisting directions of life for communities and individuals. Macrostructures and power flows experienced in these spaces, places, and times are constituted by neoliberalism, globalization, racialization, privileges, and inequalities that get replayed out and influence practice and discourse (see, for example, Nxumalo, 2019; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). An example of micro-political sites of resistance is found in Fikile Nxumalo’s scholarship that is concerned with reconceptualizing place-based and environmental education in the Anthropocene where “disruption includes turning towards pedagogies that foreground radical relationality and reciprocity with the more-than-human beings, including, water, animals, plants, and land” (Nxumalo, 2020, p. 39). She draws on the work of Black feminists and Indigenous and Black feminist geographers as she develops her thesis on place and space and childhood in relation to anti-blackness and marginalization through which she reimagines more-than-human affirmative possibilities for children of color (Nxumalo, 2019, 2020). These intra-active sites of resistance provide alternative possible futures challenging and pushing back against dominant discourses of racialized childhoods.

Spacetimematterings of classroom entanglements in ECEC have been problematized by those seeking to unhinge pedagogy and practice from dominant notions of linear time, child development, and learning. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012) explores the clock in an ECEC classroom and highlights the tension between the linear nature of child development theory and classroom routines. She proposed clocking practices as intra-active processes that constitute meanings, bodies, and boundaries, noting how historical thought on child development structures understanding of the contemporary child. The agential realist nature of clocks, classroom practices, and childrens’ response to these allows for a future where value is not solely placed on the rush for children to cognitively develop and learn accepted forms of knowledge that is measured to validate curriculum performance. In a similar vein, Rachel Holmes (2020) explored classroom behavior management inspired by a micro-moment where she was affected by “a young child’s clenched fists as he punches the air in an early years’ classroom” (Holmes, 2020, p. 497). This research provided a catalyst for, and intra-active rethinking of, fixity in classroom practices to resist dominant understandings of children and childhoods. Traditionally, behavior management relies on controlling children and their (mis)behavior. As part of reviewing data collected during fieldwork, Holmes noticed the clenched child’s fist on close viewing of a recording of the classroom. This became a nexus point of spacetimemattering to diffract past and present theories of behavior management, ECEC classroom practices and expectations, and epistemological and ontological understandings of/for inquiry. Holmes considered her own entanglement in the fieldwork, how she becomes part of the entwined research process, and how this affected her where “I [the researcher] have tried to rid myself of the idea of fixing the data, or indeed fixing the child” (Holmes, 2020, p. 506).

Embodied time was employed to consider how children’s Common Worlds in the Anthropocene can move beyond linear and ontic time. Embodied time “extends the concept of time beyond a human-centred representation to acknowledge temporal diversities such as the generations of living beings, ecological times, synchronicities, intervals, patterns and rhythms” (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Kummen, 2016, p. 433). Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kathleen Kummen argue that paying attention to alternative notions of time that draw on relational and Indigenous thought can reveal intra-actions connecting children and educators to Anthropocene pasts and futures and shift a focus to living more response-ably and sustainably. Thinking with temporality and place-spaces has also been employed to develop an understanding of how ECEC trainee educators conceptualize outdoor experiences for young children (Fairchild, 2021). By visiting historical sites of ancient woodland, student teachers became affected by the materiality of place–space that was steeped with history; this then helped them consider particular expectations for pedagogy and access for young children and became an opportunity to unsettle and unpick how certain views of place and space privileged a particular worldview and to become more open to other affirmative potentials (Fairchild, 2021). Both these examples provide alternative visions of relations, space, time, and bodies, and open up contact zones for rethinking relationality. These contact zones challenge overarching discourse and acceptable and accepted practice with young children, providing spaces for new modes of thought and sites of resistance.

Methodologically, feminist materialist research can offer alternatively more situated and response-able perspectives on relations, space, time, and bodies. The articles selected refute the primacy and privilege imposed by Eurocentric developmental psychology and child development theory (Fairchild, 2021). In doing so, they reconsider possibilities brought about by relationality between bodies and how these can provide alternative futures through the articulation of feminist materialist relational time. They provide situated responses to space, place, and time that highlight complex connections and ways of living. An attention to feminist materialism can help unpick power relations and can account for the ways to actualize alternative modes of knowledge production that accounts for past, present, and futures. The feminist materialist examples presented are a snapshot of critical inquiry in ECEC. There are a myriad of ways that feminist materialism has been enacted across a breadth of disciplines. What they all engage with are the ways in which time, temporality, and relationality are co-implicated in inquiry. I propose that these examples (and others not included in this article) of feminist materialist inquiry constitute what I have entitled feminist materialist relational time. Feminist materialist relational time is transversal in nature and considers how bodies, locations, time, temporality, and micro-moments can provide ways to understand the multiple flows of power in macrostructures. The examples I have highlighted could be a theory–practice instantiation of the concept of the Multiverse, revealing complexity and the plurality of inquiry that moves beyond representation and generalizability of knowledge. Concepts such as intra-action, spacetimemattering, and agential cuts have connected bodies and highlight the multiple and situated nature of possible Multiverse worlds. Working with these concepts disturbs and unsettles ontic time and temporality and considers the folding and unfolding of past/presents/futures. They trace the histories of neoliberalism, globalization, racialization, privileges, inequalities, violence, and also the affirmative possibilities that critical inquiry brings, proposing new ways to map the flows of life from a nonrepresentation perspective.

Conclusion . . . or Not . . . Maybe Continuation Somewhere Else

This may be the conclusion of the article, but it does not represent an ending point, rather, it is a continuation of some of the wider conversations concerning relations, bodies, objects, spaces and time in methodology, and inquiry. I have opened up a number of methodological contact zones that explore how relational bodies are produced. By exploring the theoretical nature of relational time, I have considered how multiple flows of power from macrostructures enfold and entangle bodies. The ontological complexity presented in the exploration of the feminist materialist ECEC scholarship notes the ways in which micro-moments in spacetimemattering can provide multiple sites of resistance to dominant discourses and practices, and can offer new potential realities for children and educators in ECEC.

In this article, I have sketched an argument for feminist materialist relational time that has been articulated by employing the concepts of Multiverse, spacetimemattering, and agential cuts. Ontologically, feminist materialist relational time is a folding and unfolding of eventful possibilities for inquiry and can be a response to the neoliberal agenda of accelerationism (Noys, 2014). Many scholars have considered the need to slow down research and inquiry where slow “is about deceleration as a means to create focused and nurturing ways of working against damaging conditions” (Taylor, 2020, p. 266). Thinking with feminist materialist relational time can act as what Donna Haraway calls a “contact zone” to help us think differently about time and temporality in inquiry and this can allow us to consider and (re)configure alternative future(s) “that arise in the resistance to the traditional and accepted way or ways of thinking and doing qualitative research” (Denzin & Giardina, 2020, p. 4). Future(s) posit a past left behind, a now in which we live and a speculation of what might be to come. I argue that thinking with the Multiverse, spacetimemattering, and agential cuts in feminist materialist relational time reimages the past/present/future as events and forces in flux and highlights the multiplicity of temporality where past/present/future are now, then, immanent, processual, always already in the making, and formed of intra-acting bodies. The research and scholarship I have presented helps to reveal the possibilities that are available to inquiry; they are an articulation of the Multiverse in which humans, nonhumans and other-than-humans are entangled in spacetimemattering and stabilized by agential cuts. These future(s) are always already here entangled in feminist materialist relational time where “knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world” (Barad, 2007, p. 49).