The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy was published in 2016 to critical acclaim. Rejecting outright the marketisation of the modern university, the book proposed a countercultural approach which denounced the seductive imperatives to overwork and competition and called on academics to make a more deliberate moral choice. In this paper, I critically engage with The Slow Professor's ethical vision. I draw on the work of writers Sally Rooney, John Williams and David Foster Wallace in careful (...) exploration of ‘slowness’ and its cognate terms. I am interested not only in the importance of slowness for university academics but for students in the 21st century university. These students, as pointed out recently by Bruce Macfarlane, are made to carry a plethora of conflicting identities and yet it is perhaps more important that we begin to demand less of our students and not more. Thus, in an era of audit and accountability, this paper explores the possibilities for a less frenetic approach to university teaching and learning. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores specific forms that neoliberal discourse and culture in academia today take in the field of Israeli Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The article applies various textual and contextual interrogation strategies to the language, narratives and the unsaid in interviews with leading scholars in the field, in order to construe what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘political unconscious,’ particularly that arising from the use of market as a conceptual metaphor. Contextualising this field of discourse within neoliberal academia, I deconstruct (...) the work ‘demand’ and ‘interest’ do, and highlight the dialectical dynamics of experts’ dependence on audience. I argue that, in this field, the economic discourse shelters Zionist logics, presuppositions and praxis, such as recruitment logics and fundraising practices that effectively address Jewish and Zionist students and donors. (shrink)

Contemporary epistemologists of education have raised concerns about the distorting effects of some of the processes and structures of contemporary academia on the epistemic practice and character of academic researchers. Such concerns have been articulated using the concept of epistemic corruption. In this paper, we lend credibility to these theoretically-motivated concerns using the example of the research impact agenda during the period 2012-2014. Interview data from UK and Australian academics confirms the impact agenda system, at its inception, facilitated the development (...) and exercise of epistemic vices. As well as vindicating theoretically-motivated claims about epistemic corruption, inclusion of empirical methods and material can help us put the concept to work in ongoing critical scrutiny of evolving forms of the research impact agenda. (shrink)

Academics should produce quality scholarly research. However, the demands of the marketised, neoliberal higher education institution and the increase in the academic’s bureaucratic and administrative tasks do not allow for adequate engagement with the deep work and slow forms of scholarship that are needed to produce cutting-edge and insightful research. Many academics find it challenging to think critically and creatively under such conditions, yet they are unwilling to fill their time with shallow work instead. Thus, they are torn between producing (...) an institutionally-determined number of research outputs, and striving towards producing quality scholarly work that advances knowledge in the academic’s discipline. Reading groups serve to rework this tension by providing a communal and scheduled place and mind-space for reading major academic works. Reading takes time and persistence. We find that setting aside time and creating creative spaces for reading groups offer an opportunity for silent revolt against the pressures of the higher education institution. In this (post)qualitative inquiry we diffractively read – “through one another” – two autoethnographical accounts to experiment with our experiences of various reading groups over a period of three years while positioning ourselves in relation to Barad’s notion of diffraction. This speculative experimentation entails a myriad of ideas and methods that serve to decentre hegemonic, monolithic knowledge systems through seeking alternative ways of knowing, and recognises the importance of the entanglement of matter and meaning in tracing (and countering) the social relations produced in neoliberalist contexts. Such (re)thinking is thus a vital counterpoint to the neoliberal obsessions of the higher education context, (re)directing the scholar to new non-autonomous and mutable landscapes. (shrink)

Abstract‘We just do not have enough time’. A statement uttered too often in the field of education. Having taught in K-12 schools, universities, and accelerated K-12 and higher education classes, I am no stranger to the myriad of conversations on time that swirl in these spaces. All too frequently, I heard statements like: ‘there is not enough time in the schedule to do this work’, ‘time is our enemy’, ‘do the best you can with the limited time you have’, and (...) witnessed many discussions of entanglements with time, be they individual, institutional, or structural. This article explores issues of time within hybrid/third-space working groups embedded within a teacher residency in an urban Southeastern city of the United States. In exploring the question: what role does time play in hybrid teacher residency work? This article demonstrates how time operates as a structural constraint, as a nonhuman agent, and/or is mobilized to escape/evade the nuanced and complex work of doing/thinking anti-racist abolitionist residency work across practice and theory. (shrink)

We members of settler colonial culture—the latest form of what novelist and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls Taker culture—are constrained by myriad institutions that leave us with little choice but to engage in practices that are profoundly damaging to the planet, to others, and to ourselves. Our path to living otherwise, Andrew Frederick Smith argues, lies in the threefold struggle, which is inspired by Quinn's focus on the interweaving roots of ecological, social, and personal wellbeing. These three forms of wellbeing (...) are co-implicated. We cannot enjoy one without equally enjoying the others; they are a package deal. As such, what works for people individually and collectively works for the planet, and vice versa. Reclaiming our lives and revitalizing our human and more-than-human communities are salient acts of resistance against Taker culture. They offer means of escape from our cultural captivity and an opportunity for full-spectrum wellbeing. (shrink)