The Decay of Time in Research and Teaching

This chapter explores the temporal dimensions of knowledge production within the sociology of higher education. Our purpose is to support academics so that they may draw explicitly on notions of time in framing a response to accelerated capitalism, understood as the transparency society. Through the decay of time and resultant distortion of meaning, educational research and teaching practices are reframed as temporal concerns. Higher education, particularly in countries of the global north, is constructed as an inherently linear and progressive institutions, in the service of a digital panopticon. Tenured and casual scholars alike are increasingly subject to tight temporal constraints, measurement, and the erosion of autonomy forcing the decay of meaning as the acceleration of time becomes perversely out of synch. In the chapter, we offer ways to make sense of, subvert and draw attention to time, as a way of being in and relating to the transparency society.