Slow and Fast Academic Life

From the quality of the curriculum to teaching with technology, responding to student feedback, and following the publishing mantra (publish or perish!), the numerical quantity of publications reporting academic research, and their quality (a journal’s ranking) and impact (influence) are turning university life into an academic race against time. Academics take time to produce valid and reliable scientific knowledge, but they also need to take part in an ongoing challenge with academic metrics/rates that means they have to work incessantly. In this scenario, amidst accelerations and cooling down processes, we see the need to slow things down. This is the focus of our sixth conversation, in which we discuss Eriksen’s academic history set against the doubts of a young sociologist at the beginning of her career.