Fast Times in Hallowed Halls: Making Time for Activism in a Culture of Speed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the implications of the social acceleration of time for the capacity of activist-scholars to engage in collective action. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on time and temporality, the article argues that the neoliberal university is driven by the same speed imperative that underpins the capitalist mode of production, and that the resulting and growing time pressures inhibit academics' (and others') involvement in social movements in profound and deleterious ways. To explore this argument empirically, I draw on insights gleaned from semi-structured interviews with Canadian activist-scholars. Despite the manifest diversity of temporal experiences and challenges faced by scholar-activists in contemporary high-speed society, it is clear that academics today face severe time pressures that apply across individual differences and across disciplines. These pressures, which can only be properly explicated with reference to the ruling political-economic paradigm, militate against the capacity to engage in reflexive thought (for both scholarly and activist purposes) and also against a higher level of involvement of ‘public intellectuals’ in social movements. The article's conclusion offers a few tentative thoughts about tempering the speed imperative for the purpose of self-care and by extension, for the common good in the long run.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".