Time Well Spent is a research-creation project that explores how academic communities can build their “capacity to make change in existing conditions” (Rukeyser, 1949).
Today, academic research, teaching, and learning are increasingly shaped by neoliberal priorities: efficiency, productivity, competition, and measurable success. These priorities can hide the unequal power relations embedded in university structures, curricula, and everyday institutional life (Lynch, 1989; Pack, 2028). As Justin Pack writes of higher education in the United States, universities often encourage students to focus on getting ahead and competing, leaving little space “to think and to wonder” (Pack, 2018, p. 1).
Time Well Spent asks how we might create spaces that resist the pressure to dominate, control, and exploit. How can we value difference, care, slowness, and delay while working within institutions that often reward speed and competition?
Through research-creation, the project creates temporary opportunities to explore these questions in practice. Using needlework and handcraft, poetry, and conversation, it invites participants to reflect on and challenge familiar ways of producing knowledge, teaching, learning, and conducting research. It focuses especially on the lived, embodied experience of academic work, sometimes described as somaesthetics—and considers how making things by hand and spending time together might open up different possibilities for academic life.
| Period | 2022 → … |
|---|
| Event type | Conference |
|---|
| Location | Dublin, IrelandShow on map |
|---|
- Participatory Art
- Academic Labour