Revolutionary Scholarship by Any Speed Necessary: Slow or Fast but for the End of This World

Advocates of 'slow scholarship' have called for building relations of care and solidarity across the university. But, when academia is romanticized, the possibilities for these relations are limited. To de-romanticize academia, we frame universities as terrains of struggle between competing political projects with colonial and decolonial histories. Nostalgia for the university is often tied to an ideal of liberal democracy. Feelings of anxiety about 'speed-up' originate in the liberal ideal of the slowly deliberative citizen in the public sphere. We show that this over-politicizing of temporality has the converse effect of depoliticizing other important political struggles. While jettisoning these problematic assumptions of 'slow scholarship' advocates, we maintain their desires for building relations of care and solidarity. This requires revealing the university's 'temporal architectures' and 'spatial clockworks'-how some people's temporally and spatially privileged situations are interdependent with others' oppressed spatio-temporal situations. For example, the (slow) scholarship of tenured faculty is dependent on the (sped-up) time and labor of graduate students, contingent faculty, and service workers-as well as the constrained spatio-temporal conditions of off-campus domestic workers and incarcerated persons. These intertemporal and interspatial relations intersect with other dynamics, including racism, sexism, labor exploitation, and bureaucracy. We demonstrate an approach of intertemporally and interspatially reflective scholarship through analyses of the movements of #theRealUW and #DismantleDukePlantation at our own campuses, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Duke University. This allows us to envision possibilities for solidarity across different struggles, for expanding alternative modes of study and temporal sub-architectures, and for amplifying already existing forms of resistance in the university's undercommons.