Knowledge Mediators and Lubricating Channels: On the Temporal Politics of Remissioning the University

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.