Lived Temporalities with(in) Place: Assembling a Radical Relational Praxis with T. S. Eliot

Temporality, and its critical function in the emergence of matter and meaning, has profound implications—ethically, politically, materially. It is implicit in processes of change and becoming, and in supporting our relational entanglements and sense of belonging with(in) the world. Yet, these implications are frequently overlooked. Emerging in dialogue with temporal reconfigurations put forward by T. S. Eliot in Burnt Norton, this chapter proposes that what subsequently emerges is an ethico-onto-epistem-ological imperative towards a radical relational praxis—one that can support embodied, situated and multispecies meaning/knowledge/world-makings. Interlaced with the theories of Gilles Deleuze, and further supported by thought from posthumanist scholars and practitioners such as Karen Barad, this chapter demonstrates how Burnt Norton supports the break from humanist traditions, embodying the reality of lived experience as an intricately intra-dependent emergence that actively reconfigures possibilities of knowing and doing in, and beyond, educational research and practice. Moreover, in contending that a prerequisite of expansive place-time understandings is a shift away from a static and individualist metaphysics, questions surface regarding the limits of knowability in relational praxes, and ultimately suggests the ubiquity of epistemological ambiguities in such endeavours.