Photo by Giallo on Pexels.com

My colleagues, Agnes Bosanquet, Lilia Mantai and I had a paper published in Teaching in Higher Education earlier this year, and this blog post has been on the top of my to-do list for months. Here we are in December, and I am wondering where the time has gone. Like many others, I have totally lost track of time this year.

The work that led to this article was completed slowly. It was written before the outbreak of COVID-19 (although we managed to sneak in a mention during the final review stage), but our argument about the experience of time, uncertainty and anxiety is prescient.

The idea for this paper began during a meeting between Lilia and Agnes, where they talked about the volume of time-talk amongst PhDs and early career academics (ECAs), and how it was in constant tension with leisure, pleasure and pressure…