Time-as-affect in neoliberal academy: theorizing chronopolitics as affective milieus in higher education

ABSTRACTThis paper theorizes time, affect, and politics as entangled by foregrounding the notion of chronopolitics as affective milieus in higher education. In doing so, the analysis emphasizes how time discourses and practices are embodied and affective, sometimes becoming sedimented, while other times functioning as a means of disruption. The paper draws on existing studies in neoliberal academia to argue that changing academics' affective habits created by dominant time discourses and practices requires the disruption of affective milieus in which time is channeled, routed and molded. The paper theorizes the potential of affect to be deployed as a means of disrupting sedimented social and political formations, practices and patterns of time and temporality in higher education and cultivating new affective habits in academia. The paper suggests that understanding time-as-affect in higher education makes an important contribution to existing research and theorizing on how academics are affected by time and temporality norms.KEYWORDS: Timeaffectchronopoliticsneoliberalismhigher education Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Although time and temporality are related, they are not the same. Generally, time is related to the 'flow' of time and the passing of events, while temporality is more associated with bounded time. It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a history of different conceptions of time and temporality in philosophy or other disciplines. As it will become clear, this article foregrounds a political perspective on time rooted in feminist and cultural studies (see Valovirta and Mannevuo Citation2022). For a comprehensive history of notions of time and temporality in the Western philosophical tradition – since Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, to Heidegger – see Alhadeff-Jones (Citation2017).2 Neoliberal academia refers to the idea that universities promote individualism, competitiveness and entrepreneurial practices; in this sense, the ideal academic is the one who is equipped with skills and capacities to use time more productively and efficiently (Valovirta and Mannevuo Citation2022). I will discuss neoliberal academia and its consequences later in the paper.