Time to Think Differently? Complex Temporalities in Doctoral Education and Beyond

What role does time play in how we understand and enact educational research and practice? As a concept, time has traditionally received less attention than other key considerations within education. However, this is evolving as researchers begin to embrace the value of generative concepts such as timescapes, or slow scholarship, to reimagine time as a nuanced, relational concept. These approaches deviate from purportedly objective views of linear or clock time, and instead raise important questions about how time is experienced differently within different contexts and for different individuals. In this chapter, we consider how might we see things differently if we understand time, not as fixed, or uniform, but interweaving, experienced relationally, and as having a multiplicity of meanings. We engage theory to reorientate our conceptions of time in relation to educational theory–practice. In particular, we draw upon our empirical research with doctoral students to suggest that thinking relationally about time enables us to ask new questions about contemporary timescapes of efficiency and instrumentalism in higher education. We consider the potentially unequal impact of different timescapes for doctoral students, owing to their unique circumstances, and examine how we might think differently about both time and temporal equity in higher education and beyond.