Making time/making temporality for engaged scholarship

Research on engaged scholarship has demonstrated that it requires substantial investments of time and requires the negotiation of research partners’ multiple, differing time horizons. Although the importance of time as a resource in research collaborations is generally recognized, the implications of temporal difference among research partners need further exploration. Drawing on the meso-level model of organizational temporality, we develop a heuristic framework for analyzing the temporal enactments, temporal construals, and the designable features of temporality in key practices of engagement, namely, co-missioning, co-designing, and co-enacting. The framework is illustrated with the authors’ firsthand accounts of multiple engaged research projects that highlight concrete strategies for managing the temporal difficulties of long-term engagement.