The timescapes of teaching in Higher Education

The discourses of ‘time’ and ‘change’ have received little interrogation in the field of teaching in higher education and yet both discourses arguably carry profound power in relation to our pedagogical imaginations, practices, experiences and identities. Contemporary higher education is often characterised by a precarious uncertainty, increasingly driven by strong narratives of anticipated futures. Anticipated change in the present and the future is projected onto the institutional and individual investments, risks, promises and possibilities that higher education presents at multiple levels and in a range of contexts. However, the inequalities that underpin different future-oriented investments in higher education are often made invisible by the logic of making the ‘right’ (calculated and rational) choices and ‘effectively’ managing time and change in the present (which plays out differently in different contexts). Despite the centrality of time in the (re)framing and restructuring of an imagined contemporary higher education landscape, there has been limited consideration given to conceptualising time. The dearth of research on higher education that foregrounds questions of time tends in itself to assist in the taken-for-granted ‘business-as-usual’ or TINA (there is no alternative) effect, reproducing particular spatio-temporal structures, practices, embodiments and investments (Lingard and Thompson 2017). This special issue theorises, critiques and extends concepts and discourses of time to examine change and innovation in higher education, re/ imaginings of past and future and the emergent and changing forms of pedagogical practice and experience being generated in particular contexts. The papers in this special issue grapple in varying ways with Adam’s helpful concept of timescapes (1998). Timescapes provides a powerful metaphor that extends the imagery of landscapes to enable an understanding of time as entwined with space, conceptually drawn and constituted experientially. Space-time is deeply relational, contextual and experiential, forming overarching narratives of higher education, its purpose and its future. As these then become in/visibilised and subsumed, in various ways and in different contexts, into hegemonic discourses of individual responsibility and choice, new temporal framings must then be carefully re-negotiated and self-managed by students and teachers (Bennett and Burke 2018). The papers in this special issue thus draw on theoretical and empirical contributions to examine intersecting pressures and [im]possibilities across different timescapes in higher education. This collection of papers contributes to the critique and conceptualisation of time and how time is made sense of and experienced in higher education. The papers consider the competing and hegemonic ways that time is structured, constructed and experienced in contemporary higher education in relation to processes of rapid and continuous change. The special issue considers how these processes are entwined with contested meanings of past/present/ future, and how these meanings then produce particular dispositions or positionalities in and through time and space. This also explores how the processes in which curricula and pedagogies are developed relate to underlying assumptions about change and future. Connectedly, significant policy agendas about inclusion and widening participation are interrogated in relation to time and temporality, giving much needed attention to how particular structures