Dr. Oili-Helena Ylijoki

In the current managerialistic higher education environment, the temporal dimensions of academic work, careers and identities have attracted growing interest. Such experiences as heavy time pressure, fragmentation of time, accelerating change, short-term future orientations and work-life imbalance have become a common concern. In this presentation, I will focus on temporal complexities, paradoxes and conflicts in academic knowledge production. I will discuss the temporal implications of the project format, which has become the self-evident and dominant way to organize academic research. I will ask how this kind of projectification of science shapes and shakes the temporalities of daily practices, research cultures and the ways in which academics make sense of themselves and their work. I will also distinguish conflicts between different experiential times – scheduled time, body time, timeless time, career time and personal time – and explore academics' strategies to cope with them. Empirically, the presentation draws upon interview material gathered with Finnish professors and early career academics who work in social sciences.

Oili-Helena Ylijoki is a senior researcher and adjunct professor of social psychology at the Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (TaSTI) at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests cover higher education studies, science studies and time studies. She has investigated, among other things, transformations of research cultures and academic identities, temporalities of knowledge production, gender in academia, university mergers, and student socialization. Currently she is involved also in the Nordic Centre of Excellence "NordWit", investigating women's careers in technology-driven research and innovation in and outside academe. She is a founding member of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers in Finland (CHERIF).