Knowledge Mediators and Lubricating Channels: On the Temporal Politics of Remissioning the University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Engaging with the work of Hartmut Rosa, this article offers an account of the politics of time in the contemporary corporatizing and enterprising university. It examines the emerging third mission for the university, and the ways in which this has enabled an array of new actors and their projects and practices to operate in, and on, university spaces that in turn are aimed at reworking the socialities, spatialities and temporalities of university life. Drawing on empirical work, we focus particularly on a new kind of knowledge worker in the academy—the knowledge mediators/broker—whose task it is to create the spaces and channels that move ideas between the university and the wider economy and back again, to negotiate and help navigate ideas from the world of business into the university, and to accelerate the development of ideas into marketable, scalable and profitable goods and services. Yet, we also show that these processes of acceleration are accompanied by a paradoxical set of counter-flows, undercurrents and backflows, which feed processes of deceleration. We conclude by thinking through what a counter-hegemonic project might look like that critiques and recreates a new politics of time to underpin the conditions for new forms of knowledge creation in the academy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.075 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".