Ten Years on: Making Relatives and Making Meaning in the Borderlands

Abstract

This article utilizes an auto-ethnographic approach to consider some of the tensions inherent in the requirements of sociology as an industry. Short production timelines, high expected output, and classical notions of objectivity continue to organize sociological inquiry, even as critical sociologists continue to question these very relations of ruling. This essay contributes to ongoing critical analyses of sociology's disciplinary paradigm and offers a consideration of the interstitial spaces potentially produced by 'slow sociology' as one possible antidote to these limitations. Productive of a borderlands epistemology, slow sociology resists the ruling relations of sociology and encourages nuanced translation work between cultures of study, cultures of habitation, and cultures of disciplined inquiry, fostering links between public society and academic endeavors.

Slow dissent and the emotional geographies of resistance

“…This would mean working to empower collective selves through the creation of social structures that recognize humanity. There is potential within the increasing calls for slowing down the research process (Darab, ; Gurr, ; Mountz et al , ) for the accommodation of a different research temporality that allows for fine‐grained, slow attention to social movement making over space and time. Rather than simply responding to the emotional, psychological and practical needs of the researcher, slow scholarship enables us to make meaningful relationships with the people in the communities where we research (see Gurr, )—relationships that begin the important work of decolonizing the uneven power dynamics in research processes.…”