Collage-making as slow scholarship praxis: Carving out time for art-ful ways of knowing in the neoliberal university

This paper argues that collage-making offers geographers the opportunity to engage with art-ful ways of knowing in their research processes, reframing notions of productivity and time well spent in the neoliberal academy. The reiterative processes of collage; sifting for images, cutting out, arranging and rearranging, and sticking foreground lateral thinking, emotion and playful experimentation in processes of knowledge production. Moving beyond the use of collage as method in which creative processes are instrumentalised to gather data or disseminate research findings, the paper offers examples of how collage-making can be embedded in universities and other spaces of academic knowledge production to side-step the calculative logic of ‘productivity’ and centre other values in our research practice; slow scholarship, collegiate togetherness and open-ended creative play. Drawing on a flourishing body of work on embedding collage processes in geographical knowledge practices and our own experiences of facilitating workshops for academics and researchers, we suggest that collage-making workshops disrupt the rhythms of academic time through experiential engagement with questions of process, representation and art-ful ways of knowing. We consider collage-making workshops as a praxis of slow scholarship through which we carve out time for thinking, playful experimentation and togetherness.