Abstract
In this chapter we address some of the challenges associated with thinking and researching movement, or temporal flow. We take the position that we as scholars, even as we pursue research adopting an ontology of ‘becoming’, tend to be trapped within a vocabulary developed and/or appropriated within an actor-centric ontology. This vocabulary tends to performatively enact the world as consisting of boundaries, entities, actors, and categories, risking that we lose sight of the temporal flow of material-discursive practices that we might have set out looking for. To address this, we identify some of the ways in which this slippage from the temporal back to the spatial can occur and provide an overview of concepts—building blocks of a vocabulary—that can help us remain focused on the temporality and flow of becoming. We also provide two illustrations of how these concepts can be used in ethnographic field research and what the performative consequences of the use of these concepts can be. Finally, we discuss how experimenting with vocabulary can help us decentre actors and follow the agentic flow of practices, attend to temporal conditionalities and contingencies, and ask different questions in order to find new answers. That is, to think movement.