Multiple temporalities of knowing in academic research

0444643 - SOÚ 2016 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Smith, Simon
Multiple temporalities of knowing in academic research.
Social Science Information Sur Les Sciences Sociales. Roč. 54, č. 2 (2015), s. 149-176. ISSN 0539-0184. E-ISSN 1461-7412
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GAP404/11/0127
Institutional support: RVO:68378025
Keywords : academic research * career * Czech
Subject RIV: AO - Sociology, Demography
Impact factor: 0.473, year: 2015

Based on ethnographic research at five Czech universities from 2011 to 2013, this article explores how academics make sense of and claims to three qualitatively distinct temporal regimes in which their activities as knowledge producers are inscribed: disciplinary time, career time and project time. This conceptual framework, a modification of Shinn’s distinction between disciplinary, transitory and transversal knowledge-production regimes, seeks to replace images of competition and succession between regimes with images of their recombination and intersection. It enables an interpretation of the empirical findings beyond the indigenous complaint that excessive speed is compromising the quality of knowledge production. The relationship between projects, careers and disciplines emerges from the study as problematic rather than synergistic. In this respect the paper does not contradict the claim by critical theorists that we are witnessing the disintegration of what used to be a functional relationship between the multiple temporalities of academic knowledge production based on standardized career scripts, nor the related claim that this may reflect a deeper crisis of modernity as a predictive regime for the production of futures. It proposes, however, that transversal projects can still be mediators of ‘disciplinary respiration’ insofar as their timeframes are available for variable calibration commensurate with the increasingly heteronomous ways of knowing and knowledge routines that academic researchers practise
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0247139