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Paper short abstract

This paper explores ethnographic work within fractured chronotopes, drawing on fieldwork with Black diasporic communities in Poland. I examine how colonial afterlives and socialist modernities converge, creating temporal misalignments that shape fieldwork and push toward collage as a method.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on what it feels like to work ethnographically within a fractured chronotope, drawing on fieldwork with Black diasporic communities in Poland and archival research into Cold War educational diplomacy. In this setting, two historically distinct temporal regimes—the afterlives of colonialism and the parallel modernity of socialism—converge into a present structured by deferred futures, uneven recognition, and suspended forms of belonging. Rather than treating these temporalities merely as objects of analysis, I take them as the very conditions under which anthropological practice itself unfolds.

Working across state archives organised around Cold War futurity and oral histories shaped by spatio-temporal displacement, I often struggle to sustain a shared sense of time with interlocutors. Conversations move unevenly between colonial, postcolonial, socialist, post-socialist, and neoliberal timescapes—shifting between imagined pasts, anticipated futures, and suspended modernities. Simultaneously, my research becomes fragmented across diverse materials: state archives, interlocutors’ photographs, family albums, newspaper propaganda, and oral histories. These temporal misalignments unsettle not only how the past is narrated, but how field relations are maintained and held together in the present moment.

I describe how these tensions have pushed me toward experimental practices of visual and narrative collage as a methodological response—a way of holding together disjunctive pasts, presents, and futures without forcing them into a single linear account or imposing false coherence. Collage becomes not simply a representational technique but a method for staying with temporal disjunction, sitting with its discomforts, rather than prematurely resolving it into neat analytical frameworks.