Chapter 3: Cultural Rhythmics Inside Academic Temporalities

The aim of this chapter is to explore how temporalities produced by academia defines the way we learn and interpret social life, politics, and development. Academia imposes these temporalities by teaching and managing intrinsic temporal notions of social dynamics, as the notion of past, history, present, future, pace, rhythm, acceleration, planning, expectation, synchronization, deadlines, schedules, among others. A general hypothesis that guide this work is that the acceleration of academia and the notion of time it reproduces, configures, and impact in the design of development agendas all over the world.

To achieve this aim, in the first place, it is introduced why it is possible to understand daily life among social rhythms using a method called cultural rhythmics. In the second place, it is explained why temporalities incorporated inside academia defines certain rhythmics that allows to comprehend and diagnose potential interventions, with a particular example about the rhythmic of “urgency.” The third part introduces the theoretical frame to research development as temporality, as a result of time representations that take account of the past, present, and future of a social process, analyzed through cultural rhythmics. Finally, the design of agendas in academia is explored, following a preliminary idea about how it is possible to create academic and political policies considering their rhythmics.