Ulrike Felt (2025) Contesting the Chronopolitics of Research

How long will you need to read this review?Book reviews are much quicker to ingest than books themselves and they are thus well suited to the increasingly scarce time of researchers.Yet, despite its centrality in the organisation of academic life, researchers' time has been surprisingly neglected in STS.Ulrike Felt's new, open access book offers an essential (and timely) contribution to STS debates on the role of temporalities in academic research.Moving beyond accounts focused on the acceleration of academic work, and those displaying nostalgic imaginaries of slower golden times, Felt demonstrates that researchers inhabit 'epistemic living spaces', a concept emphasising how people perceive the structures in which they work, characterised by multiple and often contradictory temporalities.Time, she argues, should be understood not as linear but as a multilayered configuration of 're-timing' (p.3).To read this review, you will therefore have to synchronise the heterogeneous temporalities you navigate: the institutional time of funding and evaluation for the projects you applied to, the epistemic temporalities inherent to your objects of study, and your subjective experience of anticipation and waiting, which are strongly shaped by your career stage.Felt's book opens with a vivid anecdote of her early STS work at CERN, conducted at a time when