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.