Articles | Volume 80, issue 2
https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-80-163-2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-80-163-2025
Intervention
 | 
25 Jun 2025
Intervention |  | 25 Jun 2025

Who can “slow down” in the neoliberal academy? Reflections on the politics of time as an early-career feminist geographer in Switzerland

Zali Fung

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Cited articles

Ahmed, S.: Damage limitation, feminist killjoys, 15 February, https://feministkilljoys.com/2019/02/15/damage-limitation/ (last access: 21 March 2025), 2019. 
Associated Press: The University of California and workers reached a tentative deal to end strike, NPR, 17 December, https://www.npr.org/2024/01/22/1226160481/why-tens-of-thousands-of-california-state-faculty-are-on-strike, (last access: 28 May 2025), 2022. 
Ballif, E. and Zinn, I.: Persistent pandemic: The unequal impact of COVID labor on early career academics, Gender Work Organ., 31, 2214–2230, https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13092, 2024. 
Bhakta, A.: A less muddy glee? Perspectives from a disabled researcher in the era of virtual Global South fieldwork, Area, 54, 531–535, https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12832, 2022. 
Boivin, N., Täuber, S., Beisiegel, U., Keller, U., and Hering, J. G.: Sexism in academia is bad for science and a waste of public funding, Nat. Rev. Mater., 9, 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-023-00624-3, 2023. 
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Short summary
This intervention examines the fraught relationship between precarious early-career researchers (ECRs) and "slow scholarship" in the neoliberal academy, based on my reflections as a Swiss-based ECR. While ERCs aspire to "slow down" and conduct more caring research, we face pressures to "speed up" outputs in a competitive job market. Precarity unevenly impacts women and shapes personal decisions about the future. Navigating this requires collective efforts that are attuned to social difference.
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