FAS 2019 Abstracts

1 explore current configurations of time and academic work. Subtle transformations in temporal and labour regimes Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological have attracted scholarly attention recently. How do the Society rhythms of audit culture connect with everyday 28.–30.8.2019 academic lives? There have also been calls to “slow down” university work. In Another Science is Possible: A manifesto for slow science (2018), Isabel Stengers has even written of the need to slow down to Time is a classic topic in anthropology: it has been avoid impending barbarism. She cites Alfred North viewed as a natural, linguistic, religious, economic and Whitehead, for whom “the task of the University is the generational phenomenon, among other things. But it creation of the future, so far as rational thought, and is hard to recall when time would have been as widely civilised modes of appreciation, can affect the issue”. researched as it is right now. The theme of the 2019 Indeed, future-talk of various kinds has entered conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society was intellectual discourse in the last few years, in part to do chosen largely to find out “why time now?” Is it with threats to Earth systems – the Anthropocene. As because we have become increasingly aware of the universities play contradictory roles vis-à-vis such plurality of temporal regimes in our lives, for example, developments, scholarly, socio-economic and bodily or because of our increased sensitivity to these due to desires increasingly clash – or do they? the increased movement of ever more people? And is Academics have personal experience of the issues. We this why the plural “temporalities” is now often can also think creatively about the less obvious forces favoured over the singular “time”? shaping the connections between ways of reckoning time, doing research and hegemonic aspirations, for Ultimately, it must be anthropology’s versatility that example for efficiency or economic growth. We may makes it particularly well suited for grasping and also challenge Stengers’ view. Contributions are narrating time as a combination of politics, space, invited from anthropologists and others, that reflect on materiality, language, scale, valuation, prediction, and their own practice, on the role of institutions or on growth – again just to name but a few themes. But student experiences, or any other aspect of the panel what has anthropology learnt from the study of time? topic. Has the current “temporal turn” gone far enough for us to take stock of its accomplishments? Student Experiences of Academic Time: Constructing Careers on Unknowable Foundations The 2019 Finnish Anthropological Society in Uncertain Times Conference “On Time” investigates these themes in CHIMA MICHAEL ANYADIKE-DANES University panels and films. The conference is organised in co- of Sheffield [email protected] operation with the discipline of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki and the The British academy’s entanglement with the British Finnish Literature Society. The keynote speaker of economy has long been complicated. Episodes, like the the conference is Ghassan Hage, and the 2019 creation of University College London, the nation’s Edvard Westermarck memorial lecture will be first civic university, in the early 19th century in given by Laura Bear on the eve of the conference response to Oxbridge’s failure to provide a relevant (August 28). university education attest to this (Whyte 2015). The Thatcher government’s 1987 white paper ‘Higher Panel 1. Education: Meeting the Challenge’ which argued Academic Time Now “Meeting the needs of the economy is not the sole purpose of higher education . But this aim . must Panel conveners: be vigorously pursued” established the current EEVA BERGLUND paradigm (British Government 1987). Universities Aalto University were to be the midwives, wet-nurses, and governesses [email protected] of the nation’s future. They were to help birth new MATTI ERÄSAARI innovations, nurture entrepreneurs, and train University of Helsinki knowledge workers. Beginning with New Labour, this [email protected] ‘vigorous pursuit’ was further encouraged by successive governments each of whom represented Is academic time out of joint? There is a sense that university attendance as an increasingly integral many of the delights of research are ever harder to feature of British life. They set recruitment targets and enjoy because institutional and economic factors have formulated ever more complex instruments for squeezed out a key condition of rewarding academic “authoritarian governmentality” (Shore and Wright labour, time. This panel invites contributions that 1999). My focus in this context are students from under- 2 represented backgrounds studying for professional While academic life centres around the axes of degrees at a well-regarded British university. research and teaching, these practices both solicit and Specifically, I analyze their accounts of time in reflect differing orientations toward time. In sync with university and explore how it has influenced their neo-liberal mandates of innovation and impact, formulation of timemaps. By timemaps, I mean research is increasingly organized around futurity: narrative schemas that they employ when they funding applications, for example, require work to be envision what professional progress looks like new, timely, and ground-breaking, and include ways to (Zerubavel 2003). At a time of labor market track and measure its uptake. But what counts as uncertainty, when the very notion of a career is “timely” research? Like the sciences, the social increasingly under attack, what, I ask, have students sciences and humanities invoke a certain monotheistic learned from academic timescapes about the art of logic in how “new” scholarship is adjudicated. prognostication? According to this logic, time is linear, as well as teleological—research projects should produce Between a ‘task-oriented’ and a ‘clock’ doctorate in tangible products, or at least impacts, preferably contemporary Finland lending themselves toward comparable, quantitative SONJA TRIFULJESKO metrics of research “productivity.” While research University of Helsinki [email protected] attends to the future, the domain of pedagogy is more explicitly oriented toward the past: syllabi, programs, As Tim Ingold (2000) has pointed out, much and disciplines frame teaching as a way to connect anthropological discussion on time, like on other students with the continuity of given traditions. topics, had been premised on the opposition between Academic instructors are often tasked, implicitly or ‘traditional’ and industrial societies. The temporal explicitly, with familiarizing students with canonical experience in the pre-industrial world revolves around texts and historical themes. While the time of teaching socially embedded activities of tasks. This task- is also linear, the rhythms of temporality seem orientation gets, however, subverted by the logic of dissonant, in generative ways, with the rhythms of capitalist production, which imposes the split between high-impact research. The call to become “slow the domains of work and social life. Time becomes professors,” for example, differs in instructive ways, governed by a mechanical clock. Ingold has, however, from the call to do “slow science.” While we are claimed that ‘task-oriented time’ had not been erased interested in exploring the invocation of “slowness”, in by ‘clock time’ with the rise of capitalist industry. this paper we query the extent to which slowness Rather, people ended up being caught in the constant interrupts linearity of either tradition or high-impact negotiations between the two extremes. There has been metrics. Further, we will examine other logics of much interest recently in time awareness at temporality in order to affirm the leaps, the abductive contemporary universities, but most of the discussion surprises, and the non-linear discoveries of engaged has been geared towards the concept of acceleration pedagogy and scholarship. (e.g. Vostal 2016; Berg and Seeber 2016; Stengers 2018). Gritt B. Nielsen (2015) has been one of the rare Talking Time: Latency & Academic Podcasting to engage with Ingold’s argument, by focusing on the IAN M. COOK tension between the task-oriented and the clock time Central European University among Danish university students. My paper develops [email protected] further this line of inquiry by extending it to include research activity. More specifically, I focus on the Academic podcasting is awash with temporal attempts to impose time constraints on PhD considerations. For some it might appear as yet another dissertation work in Finland. Drawing on my time sapping activity that scholars are required to ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the University of undertake as part of neoliberal performances of Helsinki between 2014 and 2016, I ask what does success. Others might point out how it allows them to enforcing the time-limit to a doctorate do to social get ideas in circulation quickly rather than wait for relations in the Finnish academia? How does it affect lengthy journal review processes. I draw on my people’s understanding of the academic activity and of experience of running the podcast series ‘Online Gods themselves? Finally, what are epistemological – Digital Cultures in India and Beyond’ (which I make implications of such move? with Sahana Udupa), in which we interview both interlocutors and

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