Chapter 9: Pace, Space and Well-being: Containing Anxiety in the University

In this chapter, drawing upon Unmanaging: Opening Up the Organisation to its Own Unspoken Knowledge by Teodore Taptiklis (2008),¹ I argue that we need to create the space for reflection on the pace of change and acceleration in academic timescapes and work with our colleagues as well as those in management, education and HE specialists towards ‘unmanaging’ the university. We might do this by critiquing the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson, 1984) through what Carrigan (2015) calls chronoreflexivity and chronosolidarity. In doing this, we can approach a radical democratic imaginary (Smith, 1998) for Higher Education, that is, to open and keep open spaces for relational, dialogic, reflective research and interventions in ‘academic time’ that serve to ‘unmanage’ the cultural logic of the late capitalist ‘business’ university, address what we can call ‘malignant normality’ (Lifton, 2017; Nicholson, Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Malignant normality and the dilemmas of resistance, 2018) and offer a better understanding of academic temporalities towards an ethic of care as critical pedagogy.