Multiple temporalities of knowing in academic research

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research at five Czech universities from 2011 to 2013, this article explores how academics make sense of and claims to three qualitatively distinct temporal regimes in which their activities as knowledge producers are inscribed: disciplinary time, career time and project time. This conceptual framework, a modification of Shinn’s distinction between disciplinary, transitory and transversal knowledge-production regimes, seeks to replace images of competition and succession between regimes with images of their recombination and intersection. It enables an interpretation of the empirical findings beyond the indigenous complaint that excessive speed is compromising the quality of knowledge production. The relationship between projects, careers and disciplines emerges from the study as problematic rather than synergistic. In this respect the paper does not contradict the claim by critical theorists that we are witnessing the disintegration of what used to be a functional relationship between the multiple temporalities of academic knowledge production based on standardized career scripts, nor the related claim that this may reflect a deeper crisis of modernity as a predictive regime for the production of futures. It proposes, however, that transversal projects can still be mediators of ‘disciplinary respiration’ insofar as their timeframes are available for variable calibration commensurate with the increasingly heteronomous ways of knowing and knowledge routines that academic researchers practise.

Tempo e sociedade em suspenso/Time and society in the lounge

“…O tempo na academia e na ciência tem sido estudado por diversos autores que acentuam as tendências no sentido da harmonização e estandardização e, também, no sentido da aceleração e aumento da velocidade nos processos de trabalho e produção de outputs. Nos últimos anos, os autores enfatizam que diversas tecnologias de controlo e rentabilização do tempo têm sido progressivamente incorporadas no trabalho académico, reconfigurando os espaços, as temporalidades e os ritmos no ensino e na investigação (Menzies e Newson 2008;Ylijoki, 2011Ylijoki, , 2016Noonan, 2015;Smith, 2015;Spurling, 2015;Vostal, 2015;Pereira, 2016).…”

Against reductionism: On the complexity of scientific temporality

“…Drawing mostly on Pickering's notion of temporal emergence and our reading of Latour's implicit notion of Pasteur's spatiotemporal agility, we therefore propose provisional conceptual temporal clusters that in their various interminglings and (dis)connections co-shape research practice. By advancing this approach towards scientific temporalities, we follow conceptual schemes offered by Ylijoki (2015), Smith (2015) and Felt (2017). Ylijoki, for her part, offers a model grounded in Adam's (2004) notion of 'timescapes' that analytically contrasts 'project time' and 'process time' and their conflicting nature in the lives of academics.…”

Learning academic work practices in discipline, department and university

“…Scholars studying time in academic work-lives increasingly link audit cultures, quantification of scholarship, and institutional change with the acceleration of academic life (e.g. Smith, 2015;Vostal, 2015;Ylijoki, 2013). As in studies of other professionals (e.g.…”