Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have been uplifted as a model for the way “educational research should shape the future of educational practice” (EERA, 2025). RPPs are intentionally designed to bridge research and practice through transformative collaborations (Farrell et al., 2023). Yet, these collaborations are also structured by norms that constrain full participation in various ways (Diamond, 2021). Glitches (Berlant, 2015) — moments of socio-material rupture — are important disruptions in RPPs that risk being overlooked as valuable learning moments. This paper draws on data from two RPPs to construct two scenes that illustrate how affective-spatio-temporal glitches challenge normative RPP ethics and practices. Engaging with affect and critical disability studies, I propose an integrated Affective-DisCrit framework that provides the conceptual tools to recognize glitches not as gratuitous detours or disturbances, but as meaningful disruptions that can enhance an RPP’s absorptive capacity.

In the first scene, I examine a civic-action RPP where students were tasked with envisioning the transformation of an abandoned charter school into a mixed-income housing complex in a poor and quickly gentrifying neighborhood. Touring the building, students remarked on its ghostliness and suggested it be "left alone." They also commented on Black Lives Matter signs in the community and shared their intentions to "fuck shit up" during protests. I argue that the students' engagement with ghosts, abandonment, and ruination reflects an attunement (Stewart, 2011) to a broader institutional (racist) melancholia (Vaught, 2012) and neoliberal-able (Goodley et al., 2018) political-economic landscape in which the RPP operated. Their invocations of ghosts and provocations to abandon and ruin property point to charter schools’ ephemeral lives, the closure and shuttering up of beloved public schools, and the spectral coming and going of families in the face of urban restructuring underscores. This demonstrates an attunement to the state-sanctioned violence that brings these events into a structural correspondence and renders racially-economically minoritized lives fungible. Students insinuate a spatio-temporal affectivity that resists normative orientations to racialized civic progress and belonging (Ray et al., 2017; Mahadeo, 2024).

The second scene draws from a critical disability RPP (CD-RPP) designed to increase access to higher education and research for people with disabilities. I explore how early-stage research procedures, such as using an accessible curriculum to train undergraduate co-researchers with disabilities in research ethics for IRB certification, necessitated a shift in normative research timelines and opened space for specific spatio-temporal affectivities to emerge. During ethics training, students shared intimate details about their lives—visiting family, singing in church choirs, and about their jobs. These "tender singularities" (Berlant, 2007, p.669) transgressed normative research timelines, bringing intimacy into the often de-temporalized, automatized process of ethics certification.  I argue that the CD-RPP created space for glitching, not as mere procedural disruptions, but as critical interventions that challenge ableist, depersonalized research infrastructures.

Through these scenes, I demonstrate how glitches can both challenge normative RPP practices and emerge as important learning moments. Through an affective-DisCrit lens, these moments can be unpacked and mined for how they might improve RPP’s capacities to recognize affective disruptions, adapt institutional norms, integrate diverse knowledge forms and foster sustainable relationships. This analysis responds to calls for greater attention to the significance of place and time in RPPs (Oyewole et al., 2023) and the roles of affect, emotion, and relational experience in shaping sustainable research collaborations (Ehret et al., 2016; Riedy & Penuel, 2024). An integrated Affective-DisCrit framework is essential for recognizing glitches and understanding their implications for transformative RPP practices. These spatio-temporal affectivities extend pressing RPP concerns—such as accommodating research-practice timelines and fostering trust (Coburn et al., 2016) —to account for Crip Time and access intimacy (Liddiard et al., 2024).

This paper asks: (1) What conceptual infrastructures and tools are needed to cultivate an attunement to diverse RPP actors’ spatio-temporal affectivities? (2) How might these tools help recognize moments of glitching in RPPs? To approach these questions, I draw on interview and participant observation data from two different RPPs to delineate two “scenes” of affective spatio-temporal glitching. Data in the first “scene” described above is drawn from an ethnographic case study, conducted between 2019 and 2021, of a civic action-research RPP. The study sought to better understand how teachers understand and enact their roles in the partnership, and whether and how this comes to bear on the partnership’s desired outcomes and impact. Data in the second “scene” is drawn from the first two years of a seed grant-funded work in an ongoing RPP in which the author is a principal investigator. The long-term goal of the work is to establish a sustainable, ongoing CDRPP that will involve faculty, graduate students, members of the disability community, and agencies and community groups that serve the disability community. The overarching questions guiding the development and growth of the RPP are: (1) What processes and research norms serve to fully integrate all members of an RPP focused on problems of practice for the disability community? (2) How does enacting the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’ impact the enactment of an RPP process? To narrate the data in this paper together, I engage a Berlantian idea of a “scene” as a patterned moment or situation shaped by culture, where affects are produced and organized (Berlant & Stewart, 2022). Scenes are moment-spaces charged with fantasy and possibility that structure how people experience and navigate their attachments to the world. Scenes do not just reflect individual experiences but are socially and culturally produced, meaning they are structured by larger patterns of power, discourse, and institutional arrangements. In this sense, the scene has a heuristic function that sketches out the networked correspondence of socio-affective ecologies in which RPPs operate. In other words, while RPPs vary greatly in their location, design and purpose, the use of the scene as a narrative structure de-emphasizes a focus on particularly distinct operational logics and mechanisms, and instead, hones in on how RPPs function as a space of “endurance,” where actors’ diverse desires, attachments and fantasies are negotiated and lived out.

While RPP literature highlights best practices for collaboration (Farrell et al., 2023), it lacks a grammar for identifying glitches and understanding their transformative potential. I argue that an Affective-DisCrit framework, grounded in an ethic of affective spatio-temporal attunement, is essential for theorizing glitches as opportunities for learning and growth in RPPs. The correspondence between the two cases suggests that glitching is not just about disruption, but about attunement as data—whether through the CCYE students' attunement to ruins and ghostly presences or the CD-RPP co-researchers' attunement to different temporalities and epistemic modalities. By recognizing glitches as generative disruptions, we move toward an RPP praxis that does not merely seek to accommodate diverse ways of knowing and being but actively reconfigures its methodologies, timelines, and relational dynamics in response to them. In doing so, this work underscores the need for an ethic of affective-spatio-temporal attunement that enables RPPs to be not just sites of research collaboration, but spaces where ruptures become openings for reimagining the very terms of equity, inclusion, and institutional change. While the findings from these cases are grounded in U.S.-based RPPs, they build on and contribute to international conversations on developing equitable and inclusive research-practice collaborations and co-production (Fischer-Schonborn & Ehmke, 2023; Tabak, 2022; Liddiard et al., 2019). Rethinking research ethics and institutional timelines, particularly in projects involving racially minoritized participants and participants with disabilities, is essential for making participation genuinely accessible. The Affective Dis-Crit framework proposed in this paper is one accessible by RPP actors across global contexts, and similarly invites questions applicable to RPPs in various contexts: What would it mean to design RPPs that recognize, sustain, and build from glitches as generative moments of epistemic transformation?

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