Losing Time, Making Do: Indonesian Early-Career Women Scholars’ Temporalities in Neoliberalising Higher Education

This article discusses the experiences and perspectives of Indonesian early-career women scholars in relation to time. I argue that the cultural and societal expectations for women academics to balance work and family, combined with the neoliberalisation of higher education institutions (HEIs) and scarce support, have shaped Indonesian women academics’ experiences with time. Tackling a high amount of work, administrivia, managerial work, and assigned care work in their institutions, as well as handling familial responsibilities, women academics face limiting temporal disciplining structures within which they also seek to cope. The article analyses in-depth interviews through the lens of disciplining structures and agency in cultural studies to present female academics as political subjects who assert agency in their experiences with temporalities in academia. The research sheds light on the temporal experiences of early-career women scholars and reconsiders the aptness of ‘slow scholarship’, a prominent concept in Global North academia, and considers it in the context of the Global South. The research highlights the participants’ awareness of the limiting temporal structures around them and the tasks that take time away from meaningful work. Highly cognisant of this issue, early-career women scholars deal with constraining structures, give meaning to their profession, and ‘make do’ with their conditions.