Last Updated on January 8, 2026, 2:46 pm ET
The last few working days of a very long year are an apt moment to reflect on how we experience time within the research enterprise. A recent book by science and technology studies scholar Ulrike Felt offers a roadmap to this process of reflection, drawing on more than 200 interviews and discussion groups with researchers from a range of disciplines over a span of two decades. Academic Times: Contesting the Chronopolitics of Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025; available open access) reads less like a monograph than a collection of lectures, weaving a lifetime of scholarly reading together with a sprinkling of empirical examples and personal observations. Throughout the book, Felt pushes back on stock narratives about how academic life is accelerating to emphasize that researchers are encountering ever more diverse forms of time—both fast and slow—and striving to cinch them up with each other.
In Part One, Felt introduces the historian Jürgen Rinderspacher’s concept of time generators, which refers to “the technological and social mechanisms that actively shape how time is produced and organized.” She then highlights three time generators with far-reaching effects on contemporary researchers: the organizational structure of the (externally funded) project; the linear model of the academic career, as expressed in a traditional CV; and sites of evaluation, including peer review and the use of quantitative indicators. For Felt, each of these mechanisms is an expression of power, which defines “who can impose specific forms of time on whom and who must care for synchronizing them in ways that create liveable conditions for and in academic research.” This emphasis on liveability carries forward Felt’s longstanding interest in the relationship between knowing and living, and the priority she has given to understanding how researchers assemble a decent life not only through but also outside of their work.
Part Two of Academic Times draws out the temporal aspects of researcher narratives to reveal the frictions and paradoxes that result from conflicting expectations. For instance, Felt describes what she calls a “zero-time-waste imaginary” that crowds out intellectual exploration or the cultivation of relationships with societal partners. Yet a later chapter explores the pervasiveness of waiting in academic life and the way that researchers try to keep making progress as they wait on high-stakes funding or publication decisions. Felt also examines tensions at the nexus of time and research quality; while time pressure can create the conditions for sloppy work, even the most scrupulous researchers were frank with Felt about the reality of “choosing strategies based on the need to produce results with a certain time limit.” Academic Times argues that time management strategies like these have become a kind of metarepertoire for researchers operating within a competitive global research system, even as they may take on field-specific permutations. Thus, life scientists told Felt about rhythms of feeding their lab’s cells as well as their own families, while particle physicists made the case for large-scale infrastructures that they knew would not come online until long after they had retired.
In Part Three, Felt is clearest about the normative stakes of her work on time, noting that she aims to discern “how we might gradually improve academic environments…[and make them] hospitable to a diversity of next-generation researchers.” The narratives she analyzes offered little in the way of guidance for resolving existing time binds; at best, researchers were able to carve out local spaces of exception while leaving the underlying system unchallenged. Felt also shies away from advancing her own programmatic solutions, acknowledging that researchers who do stay in sync with prevailing expectations—however fleetingly—can experience this as a source of meaning. Instead, she settles on advocating for “arts of noticing” how and where those expectations effect exclusions and curtailments of researcher agency. Once these outcomes are identified, those affected by them can become the objects of ameliorating care.
Takeaways for Library Leaders
Toward the end of Academic Times, Felt asks: “Who will take responsibility for coordination and orchestration of this adaptation work?” As ARL gears up for association meetings that will take the theme of adaptation in 2026, it seems plausible that research libraries are part of the answer to Felt’s question. After all, libraries are in the business of saving the user’s time, providing access to trusted resources and expert services that it would take the researcher longer to acquire on their own. Yet this dream of infinite convenience has its limits, and at a moment of reduced collections budgets many libraries are turning to demand-driven document delivery to minimize the delay between a request and its fulfillment. As reader expectations are reshaped by these tools (not to mention the use of generative AI), libraries can signal their commitment to matching researcher rhythms even as broader practices of retrieving information are being re-timed.
Meanwhile, proposed changes to federal research funding models in the United States are prompting research libraries to think differently about how they account for their own time. The FAIR Model developed by higher education associations defines Research Information and Data Services as one of the investments in research support by institutions that can be recouped on the basis of the actual costs of delivering them. Libraries are also exploring mechanisms for charging the cost of specialized research services directly to grant budgets. In each case, there is a movement toward making the hours that libraries pour into research support visible so that they can be appropriately valued and resourced. Libraries can embrace greater transparency about their temporal spend while being conscious of the burden of time tracking on both library staff and users.
Beyond technical fixes and accounting hacks, though, are there other ways that libraries can help relieve the time pressure researchers feel? A recent column by the writer Joshua Rothman points to one possibility, arguing for the need to reclaim our minds from both digital distractions and stale patterns of thought. If the constant challenge of staying in sync leads researchers to fixate on its accomplishment, then libraries can offer paths back to the wonder of discovery through encounters with distinctive collections that shatter our presentism or data visualizations that let us see our life’s work differently. The point is not to see libraries as a training ground for endlessly optimizing ourselves. Rather, they are a place to rebalance career demands with what Academic Times calls “biographical aspirations,” the questions that drew scholars into scholarship in the first place. The need to synchronize with broader systems is unlikely to go away, but reclaiming our minds means recalling why it just might be worth the trouble.
