Life without Clocks: Experimental autoethnography for strange-ing time and queering futures, in and through Higher Education

This paper argues that to imagine futures otherwise we must surface, explore, and disrupt the naturalized ideas of time that shape our everyday academic practice. I present autoethnography as an experimental method and medium for strange-ing time and queering futures, in and through Higher Education (HE). Drawing on four autoethnographic stories—including a two-week experiment of living without clocks—I illustrate how dominant temporalities are materially, relationally, and affectively sustained, and how practicing time differently can catalyze a wider queering of futures. In dialogue with Barad’s concepts of intra-action and performativity, I argue that queering time and futures is not simply an intellectual exercise but must be a practice-based intervention in the socio-material conditions through which they are enacted. Reflecting on the situated tensions, frictions, and other relational entanglements that arise when stepping outside normative rhythms, I propose that dissonance becomes a compass to more plural possibilities. By thinking and writing from this dissonance and queering established methodologies by defamiliarizing the cadence and form of academic work itself, this paper offers a lived account of how unsettling time can expand our shared horizons of possible futures, and helps situate queer futurity directly in the complexities of HE life. • Draws on the concept of intra-activity to link time, futures, and knowledge practices to highlight their mutual constitution. • Illustrates the performative materiality of time and futures in and through Higher Education. • Introduces experimental autoethnography as a means for strange-ing and defamiliarizing everyday practices. • Combines multiple writing forms and voices through autoethnographic stories to convey plural sense-making. • Shows the transformative and performative reach of autoethnography as a method for queering time and futures.