Research in a Time of Anti-Immigrant Politics: Temporal Rupture and the Limits of Future-Oriented Impact

Abstract

This essay examines how the current anti-immigrant political climate disrupts the temporal assumptions that organize educational research. Drawing on my experience as an international doctoral student whose dissertation research with refugee children was interrupted by escalating detentions, deportations, and the criminalization of migration, I argue that the political environment does not simply restrict research but ruptures the linear temporality that sustains it. Using Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism, I show how future-oriented research can shape the relation in ways that leave the present conditions of refugee communities largely unaddressed while securing the researcher’s own position as ethical and impactful. This does not require giving up hope. Instead, I argue for reconfiguring it, moving away from promises of future transformation toward a practice that remains responsive to what is possible, ethical, and accountable in the present.