Academic Times: Contesting the chronopolitics of research

Teaching in Higher Education, 6, 2020

In the neoliberal university, how do doctoral candidates (PhDs) and early career academics (ECAs) experience time? This analysis brings together two qualitative studies in Australian universities: interviews with 64 PhD candidates, and a survey of 522 ECAs on teaching and research experience, and identity and career development. The data is analysed using Ylijoki and Mäntylä’s (2003. “Conflicting Time Perspectives in Academic Work.” Time & Society 12 (1): 55–78. doi:10.1177/0961463X03012001364) categories of academic time: scheduled, timeless, contracted and personal. Reading Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) enables us to extend this framework to include deferred time. We argue that the dominant affect of deferred time is anxiety. As political subjects of the university, following Derrida’s line of argument, participants are in a deferred state of waiting for academic careers that are yet to come.

Studies in Higher Education, 2013

In countries such as Chile in which a neoliberal economic approach is predominant, higher education systems are characterized by productivity, competition for resources and income generation, all of which have impact on academics' experiences of time. Through a qualitative approach in which 20 interviews and two focus groups were conducted, this study focuses on a public university in Chile and examines ways in which academics experience time. The results reveal a felt expansion and contraction of time and timeframes to which academics accord different levels of investment. A patterning of narratives of time can be glimpsed in which academics are trading slots of time: they surrender part of their time to service institutional demands in return for time spaces in which they can pursue their own academic interests. Accordingly, the concept of timemarkets may be helpful in understanding the evolution of higher education systems in neoliberal environments more generally.

In the context of ongoing debates about the distinctive temporalities associated with contemporary regulative regimes, this paper explores the interpretive trajectories initiated in contrasting conceptualisations of the politics of time. This exploration is developed through analysis of interview data from a study of unconscious relations in academic practice. Section one uses one moment of data to contrast phenomenological, Deleuzian and Lacanian theorisations of the relation between time and subjectivity. Section two is an exegesis of Lacan's paper on Logical Time. This outlines the way temporality is structured in relation to the subject's guess about the expectations of the Other. Section three uses this to develop an interpretation of three temporalities that constitute the space of contemporary academic subjectivities. The final section considers the intensification of the juxtaposition of these incongruent temporalities, contrasting Lacanian and Deleuzian theorisations of time in the Real/virtual and their implications for both methodological and political strategy.

Praxis as a Perspective on International Politics, 2022

This is a book chapter from Gunther Hellmann and Jens Steffek (eds) Praxis as a Perspective on International Politics, Bristol: Bristol University Press.

International Politics Review, 2021

US universities continue to loom large in the worlds of higher education today. They consistently top many global university rankings and attract international students and faculty from around the world. In Making the World Global: US Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary, Isaac Kamola tells a compelling story about how US universities produced academic knowledge that became self-referential and embedded in the very language we use to articulate about our social, economic, and political environments. The implications are clear. How we engage and study the world is inherently political. In this intervention, I want to address two themes Kamola put forth in his opening statement. First, “whether one could write a similar book…about how universities participate in the reproduction of the world” through another perspective than globalization. I will show that this is indeed possible by situating the findings from Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era in the context of Making the World Global. I argue that, when read together, Seeing the World and Making the World Global weave a revealing tapestry of the impressive role US universities played in shaping the worlds of higher education today. The second theme I want to engage with is the academics vs. politics divide that inspired Kamola to write Making the World Global. My intention is to support Kamola’s observation that academics/politics is very much a false dichotomy and the time is ripe to apply academic rigor to its unmasking; I will do so from the perspective of academic time.

Temporality in Qualitative Inquiry, 2021

This chapter explores aspects of time, temporality and pace across ten years of engaged scholarship in the North of England. Focusing on the experience of ongoing activist work with one youth charity-Unity Gym Project-the chapter seeks to show how time features in multiple ways, both experientially (in terms of temporal dispositions and pace) and practically (as a commitment, a resource and a structuring feature that frames activities). Despite growing literature on practices of coproduction, alongside references to a 'temporal turn' in the social sciences, few authors have focused on matters of time in community-based qualitative studies. This chapter advances the methodological literature specifically in relation to community-based qualitative research by offering detailed reflections across three time-relevant domains: (i) 'being there'; (ii) balancing temporalities & synchronisation; and (iii) time commitments, capacities and expectations. The chapter concludes with a challenge to the temporalities increasingly associated with research in the fast paced and increasingly time pressured 'neoliberal academy', by considering instead the value of working at the speed of relationships; a pace that can be radically slow.

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace 'time and motion' studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two 'passes' through data-two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as 'findings' and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of 'starting somewhere else' to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life.

International Politics Reviews

2022

The tempos of academic work are shaped by teaching schedules, research deadlines, access to labs and other sites, practices of self-management (Sørensen & Traweek, 2022: 96), and various other mechanisms of epistemic and temporal power, many of which are routinely taken for granted. However, the breakdowns in established routines caused by the pandemic made the ways in which academics manage and maintain these different temporalities visible, providing an opportunity to study these practices (cf Graham & Thrift, 2007). This presentation draws on interviews with university staff undertaken during the UK’s ‘lockdown’, early in the pandemic. These explored experiences of research, teaching and management at one university, following the closure of its campus. I will provide an outline of the project (Littlejohn et al, 2021) as a context, focusing on how faculty sustained knowledge making and circulation. I will then explore how staff maintained forms of ‘excellence’ in their research and teaching (Sørensen & Traweek, 2022), using Sharma’s (2014) concept of temporality to show how ‘success’ came at a price – either for them, or for others. Many superficially recuperative practices, for example, had conservative effects, sustaining individuals’ involvement in the normalizing temporal order of institutional corporatization. I will end by identifying more radical forms of recuperation, which involved recalibration away from established work patterns and towards other tempos, such as family life or writing, in ways that allowed “reimagining time as a collective struggle [and] careful to acknowledge how the time of others is always at stake” (Sharma, 2014: 142).

This article is concerned with new feminist materialism's transformatory ethical potential with regards to the (fast) neoliberal university. It is also shaped and inspired by Karen Barad's question: 'How can I be responsible for that which I love?' (Barad 2016). The text thus investigates possibilities of thinking through new materialist theorising and concepts for examining conditions of the im/possibilities of living live-able academic lives in current political climates. As a response to those conditions a cry for slowing down has surfaced and manifestos for slow scholarship, reading, pedagogy, professors have emerged. The fast-slow dualism seems to be of pivotal importance in the ongoing criticism of neoliberal universities. The authors share concerns expressed by 'slow professors', but at the same time they argue that slow movement in the academia reestablish a problematic dualistic approach. In the text criticism of binary conceptualisations is offered by arriving at ethical considerations (instead of tactical). The article is inspired by Donna Haraway's plea to 'stay with the trouble' (2016) to uncover the complex temporalities of the present and – possibly – its subversive potential. Furthermore, while staying in this troublesome moment, the authors investigate temporal ontologies through the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2007 [1980]), Henri Lefebvre (2004) and Barad (2012) – as well as the temporalities implied in the 'slow science movement'. Finally, the video art by Bill Viola is considered as a way of accessing problematics of shifting between 'fast' and 'slow'.