Who can “slow down” in the neoliberal academy? Reflections on the politics of time as an early-career feminist geographer in Switzerland

Abstract. Feminist geographers' calls for “slow scholarship” as resistance to the neoliberal university raise poignant questions about who can enact slow scholarship and under what conditions. In this intervention, I engage critical notions of time in human geography to explore the fraught relationship between precarious early-career researchers (ECRs) and slow scholarship. To do so, I reflect on my experiences as a female early-career geographer with a 1-year postdoctoral contract in Switzerland and “foreign” researcher. While many ECRs aspire to “slow down” and conduct more caring research, we face pressures to “speed up” our outputs in a competitive academic job market. I show how precarity (re-)shapes and limits possibilities for collaborative research practices, given that building and sustaining collaborations takes time. This pertains to collaboration not only in “the field” but within our teams, institutions, and communities. I then explore how precarity unevenly impacts early-career women, who often occupy more precarious academic positions and undertake more care work in the academy and home. This is not only limiting women's career progression but shaping decisions about the future, including when and whether to have children. I illustrate how early-career precarity is marked by different “clocks” and ways of measuring time, including academic age, biological clocks, and visa clocks. Finally, I present strategies to collectively navigate and challenge the pressures of neoliberal academia at the everyday and structural levels. Overall, this paper shows how the conditions for undertaking slow scholarship are unevenly distributed and argues that this must inform recruitment and efforts to create more just and caring universities.