Marketing time: evolving timescapes in academia

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2018

Amid the growing debate about temporality in higher education, I offer a critical essay review of four recent book-length discussions of temporality in education and higher education respectively. Drawing on Alhadeff-Jones (2017) and Vostal (2016), I begin this essay review by describing the history, development, and evolution of our understanding and relationship with ‘Western’ time, and the challenges examining time’s role in K-12 education and higher education respectively. Alhadeff-Jones provides a detailed historical and interdisciplinary account of temporal and rhythmic dimensions of education. Vostal provides a temporal perspective of higher education by interrogating the changing nature of academic time. This time discussion is complemented by my review of two additional books focusing on time’s role in informing working or learning in higher education. As such, I review Gibbs et al.’s (2014) edited book, Universities in the Flux of Time, which provides a broad overview of temporality’s effects on the university from local, national and global perspectives. I then review Berg and Seeber’s (2016) The Slow Professor, which draws inspiration from the slow movement to explore how faculty can mediate and resist academia’s culture of speed. The review essay thus moves from an examination of the role and function of temporality in universities in general terms to the more specific discussion of the recent impact of time on academic work. I explore and provide critiques of the four books before, in the concluding section, providing a framework for understanding the ontological and epistemological implications of time in higher education that are currently missing in the literature.

Time & Society, 2015

Increasing time pressures, an accelerating pace of work and the need to juggle an increasing number of competing demands are common experiences of academics working in contemporary universities. At the same time, notions of 'time famine' and the 'time squeeze' have formed relatively long-standing topics of social science research and popular debate. This article draws together interviews with fifteen academics based in sociology departments at four UK universities, with existing research on time, work and leisure to explore the social dynamics which underpinned these academics' experiences. The paper argues that it is not only quantities of overall work, but the qualities of time made through everyday work which are important for academics' experiences of time. In particular, the paper identifies three key mechanisms which pull towards the fragmentation of daily and weekly schedules: work-leisure boundary-making, organisational structuring of time, and the intrinsic rhythms of practices. These mechanisms combined in different configurations depending on institution type and career stage, advantaging some and disadvantaging others. The paper provides an alternative to existing accounts about the effects of new managerialism and audit culture on academic practice, which focus on how increasing amounts of work 'squeeze time', and suggests that we should equally be concerned with how qualities of time are made in practice, and the effects of contemporary contexts on these processes.

Over the past twenty years, university administrators in North America, Europe and elsewhere have used the apparent ‘crisis’ in higher education as an opportunity to roll out neoliberal policies. For many working in the academy, the effect has been felt as a very real crisis of time, as budgets, resources and job positions are cut, and the working day is stretched to the limit. Resistance has often taken the form of struggles over wages and job security, and, by extension, over time measured in terms of the length and intensity of the working day. While such struggles are necessary, our contention is that they are not enough. Extending the distinction between kairos and chronos as developed in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Cesare Casarino, we wager that transforming higher education must involve more than “making more time” for our work; it must also “change” time. Only by so doing, we argue, can we realize — and expand upon — the university’s potential to interrupt the empty, homogenous time of capital and cultivate non-capitalist alternatives in the here-and-now. This paper thus makes three moves: one which critiques and analyzes the practices by which the university harnesses the creative time of living labor, making it both useful and safe for capital; a second which develops a ‘revolutionary’ theory of time that enables us to see capital not as the generative source of innovation, but instead as parasitic upon it; and a third, affirmative, move that explores experiments within and beyond the university with self-valorizing practices of collective learning, no longer as resource for state and capital, but as part of the ‘expansionary’ time of the common.

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.

Time & Society, 2013

In today's world, universities, in particular those in the West, have increasingly become networked, informationalized, and commercialized, and tend to operate on a clock or chronologic time like a business or corporation, though their demands on individuals are often in real or chronoscopic time terms. In light of the increasing demand in time by the university as corporation, we study in this article a neglected aspect of such a modern university: the social meaning of time for university students. To achieve our goal, we chose a Midwestern public university as our research site -a major American research university of about 40,000 students -and conducted field observations through photography and interviews during the 2009 fall semester. The research setting provided a good opportunity to observe a wide range of categories of time experienced by students. In the article we established a typology of six theoretically informed and empirically observable categories of time -scheduled time, compressed time, timeless time, endless time, wasted time, and time as goal. Our analysis through visual means demonstrates how these six types of time operate and how they are embedded in social situations and social structure. For individual students, scheduled time can confine and structure the other time categories, and it reflects the institutional demand expressed in corporate time by the modern university as corporation.