Can Higher Education Be Sustainable if Academic Lives Are Not? Care, Online Teaching and Non-Linear Academic Careers

This conceptual article examines under what institutional conditions online and asynchronous teaching can support sustainable academic participation across care responsibilities and career interruptions. It brings feminist scholarship on care into dialogue with research on academic labour, temporality and online education through a purposive, iterative engagement with the literature. Three retrospectively reconstructed auto-socio-biographical vignettes inform the conceptual inquiry without serving as representative empirical evidence. The article develops a framework linking temporal justice, infrastructures of participation and academic continuity encompassing the institutionally mediated capacity to return. It distinguishes the spatial possibilities of online teaching from the temporal and communicative arrangements of asynchronous teaching, examining the participation they enable, the labour and costs they redistribute, and the institutional responsibilities they entail. The capacity to return is proposed as one dimension of sustainable academic lives, rather than sufficient evidence of sustainability: re-entry may remain precarious or dependent on unrecognised work. Four institutional implications follow: recognising the full teaching workload, protecting temporal boundaries, resourcing pedagogical support and contextualising career evaluation. The article argues that flexibility supports sustainability when institutions preserve meaningful possibilities to participate, interrupt and return while assuming responsibility for the conditions that make these possibilities practicable.