Academic Times
Description
This open access book explores the hidden politics of time-the chronopolitics -that profoundly shapes the contours of academic life and knowledge production in contemporary universities. Moving beyond familiar critiques of academic acceleration, Ulrike Felt explores the diversity of time generators and the resultant complex, multilayered timescapes that govern scholarly work and life. The book examines the tensions inherent in models of linear careers and in simultaneous experiences of speed and waiting, and asks questions about the ownership of time. In doing so, it scrutinizes relations between time and quality, and points to the impact of time on how and what we can know, revealing how these temporal regimes create deep asynchronicities and fragmentations and perpetuate injustices and exclusions. Arguing for a more mindful approach to research, Felt advocates for rethinking academia through the lens of time, emphasizing the need for temporal care work in order to achieve sustainable and responsible change. Aimed at researchers, academic leaders, and policymakers, the book offers a compelling vision for a more responsive, long-term, and equitable academic future-one that challenges neoliberal models that prioritise speed, competitiveness, and efficiency.
Reviews / Votes
"This is a landmark study, signaling where we are and where we might go. Drawing on her rich experience in studying the timescapes of academic research, Ulrike Felt critically dissects the chronopolitics shaping them. Through a time-sensitive approach she identifies multiple time generators that structure the 'epistemic living spaces' of younger researchers. Their narratives, filled with anxieties, ambivalent aspirations and how they accommodate the prescriptive power of the dominant temporal regimes, reveal many of the gaps between the ongoing transformation of academia and what a fulfilling life in research could look like. The book presents a compelling argument for the re-timing of academic research. This is a call for action whose time has come." (Helga Nowotny, Professor emerita ETH Zurich and Former President of the European Research Council)
"With great subtlety and considerable scholarship, Ulrike Felt makes visible the ambivalences and frictions, the re-orderings and experiences that shape contemporary academia. Through the lens of temporality, our understanding of academic life is radically transformed." (Alan Irwin, Professor, Aarhus University and Copenhagen Business School)
"This outstanding book makes a major contribution to our understanding of how the shifting temporal structures of academia are affecting the experience of life and work in academic research. Anyone interested in the production of science and the future of universities should urgently read this work to grasp how the necessity of speed is radically changing how research is performed today." (Judy Wajcman, Professor Emeritus, Sociology, London School of Economics)
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Person
Ulrike Felt is professor and head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as of the interfaculty research platform 'Responsible research and innovation in academic practice' at University of Vienna, Austria.
Content
1. Introduction.- PART 1 - CONCEPTUALISING AND MAKING TIME IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH.- 2. The temporal fabric of academic lives.- 3. Technologies of making time-on the proliferation of "time generators".- 4. Knowing and living in research - On temporal sense-making.- PART 2 - EXPERIENCING TIME IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH.- 5. Academic lives in the fast lane.- 6. Academic lifelines-Trajectorising messy lives.- 7. Academic waiting games.- 8. Owning time.- 9. Time, quality, and accountability.- 10. Epistemic Temporalities.-PART 3 - DISCUSSION AND CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS.- 11. Discussion: Knowing times.- 12. Concluding reflections: Chronopolitics of academic research.