In the fifth session of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society (PaTHES) season on slow academia, we discussed time. You can access the slides below. I’ve included a note at the beginning of the slides because I had to recreate them after the session. I somehow lost or overwrote the original file and, even with IT help, was unable to recover it. This was one example of several scary incidents after covid. I misunderstood ‘brain fog’ to mean you felt foggy. I feel fine. Losing a PPT presentation was one example, being unable to count the place settings at my dining table was another. No awareness at the time, and no doubt other examples. I’m triple vaxxed. I am hoping that I am on the mend.

This session was presented during National Reconciliation Week (with the theme for 2022 ‘Be brave, make change’). Each session started with an acknowledgement that I was on the unceded country of the Wallumattagal Clan of the Dharug nation. For a session focussed on time, with an international audience in mind, I linked to Common Ground on the Dreaming and ‘everywhen’.

A way in for me to think about these notions of time has been speculative fiction by Indigenous Australian authors. Pictured are some of my favourites over the last few years:

Author Ambelin Kwaymullina writes:

“The ideas which populate speculative fiction books — notions of time travel, astral projection, speaking the languages of animals or trees — are part of Indigenous cultures. One of the aspects of my own novels that is regularly interpreted as being pure fantasy, that of an ancient creation spirit who sung the world into being, is for me simply part of my reality.”

Our slow start was to listen to a meditative ticking clock for a minute and think about time:

We then shifted our discussion to universities, academia and time: conflicting time, uneven time, measured time, interrupted time, deferred time and student time. Here are some of the quotes that prompted discussion:

“Scheduled time refers to the accelerating pace of work, timeless time to transcending time through immersion in work, contracted time to short-term employment with limited future prospects and finally, personal time to one’s temporality and the role of work in it.“

Ylijoki & Mäntylä, 2003

“… separating those whose time [is] ‘precious’ (wage earners, the educated classes, the able-bodied) from those whose time [can] be squandered or [has] little value… Power operates to structure and condition different populations’ lack of time … There is a heterogenous and uneven response to speeded up time … What proliferates is a multiplicity of contradictory temporalities.”

Baraitser, 2017

“Amid deadlines, fear of survival, and accountability measures, time becomes an important tool for perpetuating neoliberal subjectivity. As hyper extensions of colonial time, neoliberal logics operate to measure, splice, and commodify time in ways that is affectively experienced by individuals navigating the academy.”

Shahjahan, 2015

For an excellent literature review on time in academic contexts, and a thought-provoking discussion to consider student time, I recommend Bengtsen, Sarauw & Filippakou’s (2021) chapter ‘In Search of Student Time: Student Temporality and the Future University‘ in the collection The University Becoming: Perspectives from Philosophy and Social Theory. The authors ask: “The Covid-19 pandemic is a challenge to the universities’ organisation in time and space, but do we actually want to return to the functional and linear temporality that characterised the pre-pandemic university?”

Other recommended reading included:

• the special issue of Teaching in Higher Education on the timescapes of teaching
• the special issue of Higher Education Research & Development on academic life in the measured university

Our discussion of time spanned Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory; using productivity strategies such as pomodoro; St Augustine’s notion of past, present and future in the mind; the 2021 filmThe Lost Daughter; and flow. One participant said: “I find academic time to be a mostly unhappy thing unless I’ve corralled it with pomodoros. I either feel desperate and anxious, or strangely slack, like a rubber band that’s been stretched for too long.” At the end of the discussion, we returned to the notion of everywhen, and the interconnections of past, present, and future.

Finally, we were exhorted to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I must say the 1,267,069 word count is daunting. Perhaps future me might have world enough and time (to quote Andrew Marvell or Doctor Who).