Coloniality of Time Defacing Unsustainable Temporal Paradigms in Educational Research and Practice

We suggest that many current forms of educational research are unsustainable since they formalize unreflective or unthought presuppositions of temporality by continually narrativizing homogeneous time, linear narrative, and progressive teleology as modes of existence. These modes are enmeshed in the very fabric of scholarly inquiry. We call this a monogrammos concept of time—a simplified or sketched outline of time, emphasizing a single linear progression without its multidimensional and interconnected nature. It functions as a naturalised, institutionalised and presupposed order of being and doing—perhaps most evident in developmental research studies. In this chapter, we show how time in educational research operates as a racially coded, biocentric artifice that continually reproduces, conditions, and materializes unsustainable neoliberal hegemonic discourses of knowledge, information, progress, order, abstraction, and universality. We use a speculative research method—we dramatize the tension between established time in educational research processes on the one hand, and certain capacities of time to bear on educational research alternatives on the other—as a way of exposing, or defacing, the unsustainable temporal paradigms of educational research and practice.