When anthropologists of education, who embrace an activist or action-focused orientation, locate their work within community-based settings, they bear a responsibility to act in ways that not only produce new knowledge but that are also responsive to the immediate circumstances. Katherine Schultz's Presidential Address evokes two related tensions: one is a tension of temporality wherein the contexts of our research may seek and demand greater urgency in how we enact ourselves than may be typical of anthropological work. A second tension involves how knowledge is produced in and about these contexts. Both of these tensions are explored through a discussion of Kathy's research and a long-term, community-based project located in an alternative to detention program where I have been engaged in participatory ethnographic research for close to a decade.