Special forum: Teaching Time

Nancy Fraser and Participatory Parity, 2020

In this paper I think about the possibilities of resisting the flows of financialised capitalism and finding time for pleasurable affects in teaching and learning. Why pleasure? Because, as bell hooks reminds us, ‘the pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance countering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize the way professors and students feel’ (hooks 1994, p. 10). Diffracting the critical theory of Nancy Fraser with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I investigate ways to engender vitalism – jouissance – in higher education.

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.

Organization, 2019

This article seeks to examine, in a cultural–historical perspective, how the ‘graduate’ has developed as a character central to a significant segment of the contemporary labour market. The argument begins by showing how the rise of the ‘new’ or ‘knowledge economy’ (throughout the 1990s and 2000s) became a new source of pressure on generations entering the world of work. Higher education has been, and continues to be, presented by political, corporate and educational institutions as a core platform upon which future possibilities of personal achievement and accomplishment depend. Gradually, the vocabulary and character of the ‘graduate’ has become more visible through complex and refined modes of cultural dissemination. The themes through which this character is articulated today have, we argue, cultural roots that are not entirely new. With reference to David Riesman’s early understanding of the formation of this kind of cultural ‘character’, we examine Charles Webb’s 1963 novel The Graduate. As a cultural–historical resource, it can be revisited half a century later in order to investigate the historical movement of certain themes and questions that now outline what a ‘graduate’ could and should be. The imperatives that underlie the labour market for graduate schemes open up questions that pertain not only to immediate matters of employment. Rather, the discourses of ‘graduate work’ and ‘employability’ now appropriate deeper concerns regarding the meaning of individual freedom, choice and self-determination. Who is the ‘graduate’ and what are some of its cultural roots?

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.

Journal of Education Policy, 2019

Amid growing studies of time in higher education, few have theorized the interconnections between affect, academic work, and temporality-the way we make sense of and relate to time changes-in the neoliberal academy. By interconnecting temporality with shame, this article presents a critique of dominant temporalities of neoliberal higher education by exploring the differing existential temporalities associated with academic work. It presents and teases out the various manifestations of a dominant 'temporality mirror' and its relationship with affect. It argues that academic life's temporality mirror is embedded in shame logics (i.e. 'Being for others'). The temporality mirror acts both a) as an external thing (i.e. external object of reflection triggering self-evaluation) and b) internal way of knowing/being (i.e. internal node of existential/embodied self-evaluation). Such shame logics manifest through various temporal dimensions such as: a) temporal norms, b) future selves, and c) the future of others. This article proposes a set of questions that may open the possibility of delinking from the dominant temporality mirror and concludes with implications for academic subjectivity, higher education institutions , and higher education policy.

Scope of the Course: This course examines the neoliberal transformation processes in the higher education with special emphasis on everyday academic life. The course starts with an exploration of space accorded to (academic) knowledge production in capitalism. It proceeds to the discussion of the way academic life—both in terms of campus and office spaces, and the academics' involvement in knowledge production regimes—has evolved throughout the different phases of capitalism. The focus of the course is the most recent, and still ongoing neoliberal phase. Within the scope of the course, we will read, among others The main questions this course will ask are: 1) What are the structural factors that necessitate the use of the term " academic " labour? 2) What are the distinctive features of labour processes that require distinguishing between academic and non-academic labour? 3) What are the junction points between academic and non-academic labour processes within the academic space? 4) How do neoliberal knowledge production regimes differ from other forms of capitalist mode of production? 5) Where and how is the agency situated in neoliberal knowledge production processes? 6) Where and how can one search for a balanced method for understanding the interplay of structural and agency-related aspects in the reproduction of neoliberal knowledge regimes? 7) What are the similarities and differences among the neoliberal knowledge production processes at national and international levels—i.e., is there a global division of academic labour across countries? 8) How do different axis of identity— gender, ethnic, religious—crosscut class-based politics in the knowledge production regimes? The course is designed to offer ways and routes to address these and related questions. Certainly, we will not be reaching to definite conclusions and decisive answers to the questions that will guide us all throughout the term. Yet, we will have acquired the textual and perspectival means to locate the state of affairs in contemporary academic knowledge production processes with a comparative perspective. In so doing the course will evolve through three axes: 1. Understanding neoliberalism; 2. Locating academic knowledge and academic everyday life into modern societal and political settings; 3. Understanding the global division of academic labour across genders, ethnicities, and classes—cross-cultural comparative work on academia. Weekly outline of the course is thus divided along these three axes.

Higher Education Research and Development, 2024

While much has been written about international students, the temporal dimensions underpinning and intersecting these students’ experiences remain under-theorized within existing scholarship. In this conceptual article, we aim to chart some of the temporal intricacies underlying the complex emotional and spatial elements of international students’ lives, decisions, and trajectories, implicating research and practice. We explore temporal dimensions such as: the dominant temporal structure (clock time), temporal discontinuities, and the interconnections between temporality, privilege, and oppression, and how these facets mediate the nature of international students’ experiences. Overall, we argue that a temporal lens helps provide a more nuanced and holistic perspective on research and practice with international students.

The Australian Educational Researcher, 2002

My discussion focuses on the cultural practices of graduate studies. I call these cultural practices rather than 'themes' or topics to consider a program of conduct through which rules and standards of reason are generated to produce a 'graduate'. My assumption of graduate studies is that it embodies strategies of disrupting the complacency of the assumption of the progressive character of the present society and the established rules that normalize conduct. Section One is historical, considering university graduate studies as concerned with the management of society constituted by the agency and empowerment of the citizen. Section Two focuses on the cultural conditions for critical strategies that interrogate the systems of reason that shape and fashion what we are and might be. I speak of this focus as a form of resistance. The final and third section uses an autobiographical genre to consider further the cultural conditions of knowledge. My focus is on learning how we think about and ask questions, and on learning to read closely and historically in dislodging the ordering principles of schooling.

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.

Australian Educational Researcher, 2002

My discussion focuses on the cultural practices of graduate studies. I call these cultural practices rather than 'themes' or topics to consider a program of conduct through which rules and standards of reason are generated to produce a 'graduate'. My assumption of graduate studies is that it embodies strategies of disrupting the complacency of the assumption of the progressive character of the present society and the established rules that normalize conduct. Section One is historical, considering university graduate studies as concerned with the management of society constituted by the agency and empowerment of the citizen. Section Two focuses on the cultural conditions for critical strategies that interrogate the systems of reason that shape and fashion what we are and might be. I speak of this focus as a form of resistance. The final and third section uses an autobiographical genre to consider further the cultural conditions of knowledge. My focus is on learning how we think about and ask questions, and on learning to read closely and historically in dislodging the ordering principles of schooling.