Please join us in WBW G.8, refreshments provided. For those who can’t come in person, the online meeting link is here: Click here to join the meeting

The visceral experience of everyday time poverty and temporal compression/acceleration affects most who work in higher education. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in London have these experiences compounded by the city’s spatiality, with distances and frictions of travelling/moving further confounding time ‘use’, rhythms of work, and simply ‘being in the same place’ with colleagues and students in the face of increasing workloads, austerity in the sector and the cost-of-living conditions more broadly.

Temporality in HE has become an increasing focus of research, although few studies factor in spatiality as a fundamental component of temporality, despite space and time being intrinsically connected. In this interactive session, we will first explore some of the prevailing literature on time-space in education in general (as a form of governance and as a fundamental facet of everyday institutionalised life) as well as specifically in the HE sector. Equipped with these conceptual tools, we will then have a 30 minute ‘focus group’ style discussion to think through how we might study our own temporality within ECS, with a focus on an empirical study being conducted in Autumn on this issue for the Workload Working Group.

The session is led by Dr Sara Black, who will present some initial ideas to seed discussion before we explore the following questions as a group:

• What concepts help us to think about and examine our own spatialities/temporalities in ECS?
• What kind of data could/should we produce to examine these phenomena, and what sort of validity threats are present?
• What ethical considerations are thrown up when examining/recording/describing/analysing our own and colleagues’ temporalities in their work-life?

The discussions in this group will feed into a research proposal, and hence colleagues’ perspectives and concerns would be greatly appreciated. 

Sara Black is a Lecturer in Education and Society at ECS, whose primary research focus draws on geography traditions to study temporalities and spatialities in education, including the role of political economy and EdTech in shaping and transforming time-space relations. She also has a secondary focus on discourse in education as it shapes everyday life and political-economic relations within and without education institutions. Sara convenes the modules ‘Theories of Change in Schooling: Truth, Power, Evidence’ and ‘Education Leadership and Change in Context’ for the MA in Education Management, and is a Research Associate with the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg. Prior to coming to London in 2022, she worked at the University of Cape Town on the Postgraduate Certificate of Education programme and also as a secondary mathematics teacher in a township school in Hout Bay, where she served as a deputy principal. She does advisory work for South African education NGOs, particularly regarding policy application and education governance.