Academic waiting games: A paradox in an accelerated academy?

• In Event: ‘Doing Time’: Temporal Imaginaries, Performances, Practices, Infrastructures

Abstract

Over the past years the temporal (infra)structures that sustain academic institutions and shape the lives and work of researchers in them have gradually become a matter of concern. In particular issues of speed, pressure and rising competition together with the growing importance of quantitative indicators to measure scientific output and its quality have been critically discussed as producing adverse effects on the work and lives of researchers. This contribution specifically will shed light on the role of waiting in academia. This might seem paradoxical at a time when we diagnose a continuous performance of a lack of time. However, I will argue that it is exactly the contemporary temporalization of academia that brings also a revival of "waiting games". "Making people wait ..., delaying without destroying hope is part of the domination", Bourdieu reminds us. Thus, studying waiting games will allow us to look into a part of the complex topography of power in academia. Waiting for a window of opportunity, for the next open position, for the reviews of papers and projects to come back, ... and many more have become key elements in academic lives. Waiting games create new types of uncertainties that in particular young scholars have to navigate and cope with. To investigate waiting as a central part of academic temporalities is thus essential to understand both, the ways power is distributed and exercised but also how young scholars are, over quite long stretches of time, "held" committed to academic waiting games.

Author

• Ulrike Felt, University of Vienna, Department of Science and Technology Studies