Conference Agenda

Studies of student satisfaction, dropout, failure, and disappointment with grading and examination events are plentiful. There are fewer corresponding studies of faculty, except for PhD students' experiences (McAlpine, Skakni, & Pyhältö, 2022). Higher education is characterized as an instrumental selection process designed to complete a meritocratic project of separating the wheat from the chaff, the talented from the untalented, and the promising from those who cannot expect an academic future. This process is a reflection of the competition that exists for a position or promotion in the academic world. If you succeed with your education and also qualify for an entry-level qualification for employment, there are still many who do not succeed in the competition for that one position at the institution where the applicant wants to build a career. Whether applying for a position in competition with others or for promotion based on merit criteria, there is excitement, anticipation, and, in some cases, desperation, shame, and disgust when applicants are rejected, and experience negative judgments and downward thumbs down. Students' assessment of teaching can be disheartening, and colleagues' unwillingness to understand or comply with decisions or agreed principles, just as a decree of rejection or crushing peer reviews can undermine employees' faith, hopes and dreams. For the person concerned, the experience of such crises is a process of depletion of ardour and enthusiasm, self-confidence and ambition - or it is part of a resilience-building experience base. When life in higher education institutions is portrayed in university self-presentations, it is almost without exception positive news, about careers flourishing, projects being won, and results being achieved. To some extent, critical journalism leads to pointing out injustices, crises, poor working environments, and intolerable conditions for individual academics. Stories about sexual harassment, unreasonable favouritism, unequal distribution and unfair conditions are the critical approach of trade union journals. Similarly, there is a large research literature on the experiences of students and staff during COVID-19.

To get through disappointments, rejections, and inhospitable mechanisms in higher education, resilience research shows that people who can be flexible and adaptable more easily take disappointments as part of the ordinary register of experience and remain resilient. They can dismantle challenges into manageable sub-tasks and continue undaunted (Robertson, Cooper, Sarkar, & Curran, 2015). They show the ability to develop emotional intelligence, which involves an ability to regulate their reactions to emotional fluctuations within themselves and from others, show coolness when crises occur, find support from significant others, and develop good relationships with others. Resilience is also linked to an ability to maintain oneself, both physically and mentally, balance work and private life and regulate one's feelings of stress, dimensions that are largely trainable. People with resilient traits are also diligent in maintaining supportive networks and anyone who can provide positive support through challenging times. The research literature shows that people who are characterized as resilient and satisfied in their profession are less likely to experience the challenges as exhausting (Castro, Labra, Bergheul, Ependa, & Bedoya Mejia, 2022).

Our research question is how employees in higher education develop this balance of well-being and ambition in light of the distinctive experiences each individual has with adversity and success, rejection and acceptance, and how support and perseverance are shaped through networks and as a result of individual characteristics. In our study, we want to shed light on the experience of being part of the academy's meritocratic theatrical game and what this can do to the individual in their encounter with themselves and others as a professional.

In this essay, we offer a temporal lens to open new ways of conceptualizing decarbonizing academic work. While there has been a growing literature on climate justice and higher education (HE), remaining undertheorized is the temporal aspects of decarbonizing academic work. While some have critically examined the role of HE in climate change, through interrogating its purpose, curricular reform, and the role of students and faculty in the current climate crisis (Grady-Benson & Sarathy, 2016; McCowan, 2023; Rae et al., 2022; Reyes-Garcia et al., 2022; Stein et al., 2023; Williams & Love, 2022), others have interrogated the climate change consequences of internationalization of HE (McCowan, 2023; Shields, 2019; Shields & Lu, 2023). Most of these discussions have taken place in the context of Global North, and rarely apply a temporal lens. We draw on our experiences and research on Bangladeshi academia, as an entry point to explore intersecting questions of climate politics, academic work, and a global South context for climate justice.

We argue that a temporal lens helps us illuminate the temporal politics underlying the possibilities and challenges of contemporary decarbonizing academic work globally. By temporal politics, we mean the inherent social-power relations, assumptions, and/or biases of social action (i.e., advocacy, decision-making), related to the way we make sense of, connect to, and experience time, that goes beyond, but also includes clock time. As such, we offer a temporal political reading of the common solutions offered in decarbonizing academic work, namely reconsidering a) aeromobility, b) digitization, and c) futurity.

We believe a temporal lens is pertinent in the debates about HE’s role in climate justice for several reasons. First, we echo Facer’s (2023) suggestion that we need to ask temporal questions in the climate crisis debates, such as: “Who is telling the time in this situation and how?... What are the histories and habits that shape my own temporal assumptions, where do these come from, and what sustains them?” (p. 64). As such, we can raise tough questions about how the problems and solutions towards climate change are embedded in dominant paradigms of knowledge (Stein et al., 2023), including time. Second, climate change is an unfolding temporal phenomenon, and not a singular event, which interconnects larger macros processes with the everyday, including academic life. Finally, incorporating a temporal lens further helps nuance the role of HE in the climate crisis by illuminating the ontological variance in framing the climate crisis, the inequities in Global North/South academic mobility, and the role of clock-time in academic work.

In 2022, the Swedish government funded a national academic development enhancement project. It was administered by the Swedish Council for Higher Education (UHR), who commissioned the Network for Academic Development Leaders (HPCF) to provide a comprehensive practice-oriented mapping of leadership of education in Swedish academia. The network brings together all 28 appointed leaders of Swedish academic development units, acting as a national node and strategic partner for educational development in higher education. HPCF appointed researchers from three of Sweden’s largest universities to lead the project, as well as a reference group with experts in the field of academic leadership from the Nordic countries.

It is a truism that research is valued higher than education within the sector, and HPCF concluded that discussions of leadership of education in Swedish academia are much too rare. Indeed, the fact that the mapping was to be carried out as part of an initiative to enhance academic development set the direction for the project, in line with its declared purpose to strengthen the strategic educational leadership of universities.

We, the researchers in the project, have extensive experience of leading academic development work, and take every opportunity of trying to contribute to positive change in education and quality. Mapping leadership of education in academia is an urgent and important task and when planning for the mapping project, we saw an opportunity to use our situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) of leadership and development to cultivate change at the same time as we conducted our study. So, how does one design a study that both generates knowledge and cultivates change in the institutions one studies while studying them?

We consider qualitative research on higher education, where researchers meet colleagues and students, also as a pedagogical process. As researchers in this context, we have a responsibility to be responsive – learn, reflect and develop our methods and approaches – both before and while conducting the research. Our understanding of our role during the research process is based on Donna Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledge, which emphasizes the context-dependence of knowledge and challenges the idea of universal objectivity. When we meet our informants, we adopt a situated objectivity, in Haraway’s sense, where our perspective is grounded in the context while striving for a responsible investigative approach in relation to the people we meet.

In this paper, we present and analyze how different parts of the research process have been designed, providing opportunities for cultivating change, in addition to the potential development that may come from the knowledge collected for the mapping project itself. It is, therefore, primarily a methodological contribution, which we hope can create awareness and reflection among other researchers studying colleagues and practices within higher education.