2019 Chapter:
“Waste Time: Excess Potential in Academic Production,” in Reversing the Cult of Speed in Higher Education: The Slow Movement in the Arts and Humanities, eds. Jonathan Chambers and Stephannie S. Gearheart (Routledge, 2019), 141-155 (co-authored with C. Greig Crysler; sketches by C. Greig Crysler)
ABSTRACT:
In this chapter, we examine the politics of time in academic research through processes and epistemologies of waste. We draw upon our extensive experiences as academic waste managers, by sorting through textual discards, remainders and extras, abandoned drafts, failed and operative writing strategies, as a way to rethink the relationship between time and academic production. The chapter begins with an overview of the general conditions, political economy, and institutional settings of knowledge production. We depict the dominant corporatist model and “producerist” framework of knowledge‐making by using the figure of an academic production line and treadmill of publications and credentials. We then introduce our ongoing collaborative work through the self‐reflexive allegory of a “museum of waste.” Sifting through the “waste heaps” of our own research, we explore how our work has been driven by crises and disruptions that constantly redefine our research agenda and work practices. Detailing several of the tactics that we use—such as scavenging and creative re‐use—we contemplate the temporality of research focused on the present, and the time‐making and timewasting necessary for collaborative work. A sequence of exhibits (both images and vignettes) of our work shows how an “epistemology of waste” animates our experimentations and requires/generates different temporalities and practices than linear thinking and academic conventions of time. Contrary to the paradigm of ‘slow’ scholarship, which reproduces the producerist criteria and normative framework of academic work, the chapter offers several “waste‐full” strategies to imagine alternative modes of research production, including: excess (proliferation of research temporalities based on energy, curiosity, and inquiry); ethical sorting (a politics of time linked to embodied research and planetary crisis); and research commons (shared resources, public goods, and new coalitions).
Image Credit: C. Greig Crysler