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

Abstract

ABSTRACT This 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.