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Reading time: discovery, meaning-making and resistance in the accelerated academy

by Fadia Dakka

The increasing exposure of higher education sectors worldwide to market mechanisms (eg privatisation in and of higher education, platformisation and assetization) generates market-making pressures, technologies and relations that are changing university missions and academic practices in both research and teaching, altering not only forms of knowledge production but also academic identities (Lewis et al, 2022).  These corporate, competitive systems operate in and through regimes of time acceleration and compression (Rosa & Trejo-Mathys, 2013; Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017) that enable capitalist accumulation via a proliferation of calculative practices and surveillance techniques driven by instrumental logics. In essence, the timescapes of the ‘accelerated academy’ (Vostal, 2016) have come to be not just dominated but defined by the linear rhythms of knowledge production, accumulation, consumption, and distribution.

In this context, ever-present tensions continue to pit institutional time scarcity/pressure against the often non-linear times, rhythms and practices that characterise the craft of intellectual work. These are acutely visible in doctoral education, which is considered both a liminal space-time of profound transformation for students and a rite of passage through which doctoral candidates enter the academic community.

Doctoral students in the accelerated academy experience tremendous institutional pressures to complete their research projects within tight timeframes punctuated by developmental milestones. At the same time, they are pressed to publish and participate in externally funded projects before completing their course of studies, to secure a positional advantage in a hyper-competitive, precarious job market.

In such a climate, pressures to develop core academic skills such as academic writing abound, as a quick glance at the vast literature available to both novice and accomplished researchers to help them improve the quality and quantity of writing reveals (eg Sword, 2017, 2023; Murray, 2025; Wyse, 2017; Moran, 2019; Young & Ferguson, 2021; Thomson, 2023; Sternad & Power, 2023). 

Much less attention is devoted to reading as an autonomous practice in relation to educational research. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and mostly equated with a strategic, extractive process whereby academics retrieve, survey or review the information needed for writing to maximise efficiency and speed (Fulford & Hodgson (eds) 2016; Boulous Walker, 2017).

Doctoral students are taught to tackle the volume of readings by deploying selective, skim and speed-reading techniques that ‘teach’ them a practical method to ‘fillet’ publications (Silverman, 2010 p323) or ‘gut(ting) an article or book for the material you need’ (Thomas, 2013 p67). Without dismissing the validity of these outcome-oriented techniques, I argue that reading should be approached and investigated as research, which is to say as a philosophical orientation whose intimate relation with thinking (meditation and contemplation) and writing (as a method of inquiry) constitutes a conjuncture with transformative potential for both the reader and the text (Hoveid & Hoveid, 2013; Dakka & Wade, 2018). [RC1] [FD2] 

In 2024, I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme grant that allowed me to examine, in collaboration with Norwegian colleagues, the under-researched area of reading habits, rhythms and practices among doctoral students in two countries, the UK and Norway, characterised by a markedly different cultural political economy of higher education. The project set out to explore how a diverse group of doctoral students related to, made sense of, and engaged with reading as a practice, intellectually and emotionally. Through such exploration, the team intended to examine pedagogical and philosophical implications for doctoral education, supervision, and, more generally, higher education through a distinct spatiotemporal lens.

The project experimented with slow reading (Boulous Walker, 2017) as an ethico-political countermovement that invites us to dwell with the text and reflect on the transformations it can produce within the self and the educational experience tout-court. Examining the practice of reading is, therefore, vital to foster the development of the criticality and creativity that inform the students’ thinking and, ultimately, their writing, helping to create better conditions for meaningful educational engagement.

As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a dearth of literature in educational research focused explicitly and directly on reading as a research practice. Conversely, Reading Theory and Reader-Response criticism (Bennett, 1995) are well-established strands in literary studies.

Two contributions inspired the project in the cognate fields of philosophy, pedagogy, and education ethics, underpinning the theoretical and methodological framework adopted: Aldridge (2019), exploring the association between reading, higher education and educational engagement through the phenomenological literary theorisations of Rita Felski (2015) and Marielle Macé (2013). Reading here is considered as a phenomenological ‘orientation’ with ontological character: the entanglement of body, thought, and sense makes reading an ‘embodied mode of attentiveness’  with ‘rhythms of rapprochement and distancing, relaxation and suspense, movement and hesitation’ (Felski 2015, p176). Lastly, Boulous Walker (2017) introduces the concept of ‘slow reading’, or reading philosophically against the institution. This practice stands in opposition to the institutional time, efficiency, and productivity pressures that prevent the intense, contemplative attitude toward research that is typical of active educational engagement. The author calls, therefore, for slow reading, careful reading, and re-reading as antidotes against institutional contexts dominated by speed and the cult of efficiency.

Bridging cultural sociology and philosophy of education, the project combined Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Schutz, 1972; Ricoeur, 1984) and Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to gain insight into the lived experiences, embodied and cognitive processes of meaning-making, and spatiotemporal (rhythmic) dimensions of reading among doctoral students.

The complementarity of these frameworks enabled a richer and deeper understanding of the phenomenon from a socio-cultural and philosophical perspective. The rhythmanalytical dimension drew on the oeuvre of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Conceived as both a sensory method and a philosophical disposition, Rhythmanalysis (2004) foregrounds the question of the everyday and its rhythms, offering insightful takes on repetition, difference, appropriation and dwelling. Lefebvre’s analysis of the conflicting rhythms of the social and the critical moments that revive/subvert the humdrum of the quotidian pivot on the experience and resonance of bodies in space-time, their imbrication with the fabric of the social and the multiplicity of their perceptual interrelations with human and more-than-human environments. Methodologically, Rhythmanalysis enabled a closer look at the students’ reading habits, rhythms and practices in relation to their doctoral studies. The emphasis on spatio-temporality and (auto-)ethnographic observations made it possible to register and grasp the tensions that derive from clashes between meso institutional constraints and demands (eg set timeframes for completion; developmental milestones), micro individual responses and circumstances (eg different modes of study, private and/or professional commitments) and macro societal context (eg cognitive, extractive capitalism).

The phenomenological facet of the project drew on the hermeneutic, existential, and ontological dimensions found in Ricoeur’s and Schutz’s philosophy, which are concerned with grasping experiential meanings and understanding the complexity of human lifeworld.  Acknowledging the entanglement of being and Dasein as an ontological standpoint, human lived experiences are situated within a contingent spatiotemporality and understood through an interpretivist epistemology founded on intersubjectivity, intentionality and hermeneutics.

This phenomenological-rhythmanalytical inquiry was therefore designed to explore students’ cognitive and affective experiences and practices of reading as they unfolded in the spaces and times of their doctoral education. The project involved two groups of doctoral candidates based in the Education department of, respectively, a teaching-intensive university in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham, UK), and a large, research-intensive university in Norway (Trondheim).

The first phase of data collection involved Focus Groups and Reflective Diaries. It foregrounded the times, places, and rhythms of reading, considering reading modalities and patterns of doctoral students in the context of institutional demands vis-à-vis personal and professional constraints. Rhythmanalysis was employed both as a method (reflective diaries) and as an interpretive, diagnostic tool to uncover and critically reflect on arrhythmias (ruptures) and/or eurythmic pockets in the reading patterns of doctoral students.

The second data collection phase relied on hermeneutic phenomenological techniques, such as Episodic Narrative Interviews (Mueller, 2019), to delve deeper into the affective, material, and cognitive experience that connects and transforms students and their readings.

The final stage of data collection involved an experiment in collective slow reading and re-reading against the institution, inspired by Boulous Walker’s philosophical reading and Felman’s description of the interpretative process as a never-ending ‘turn of the screw’ (Felman, 1977) that generates a hermeneutical spiral of subsequent, ever richer, and different textual interpretations.

Initial findings point to a complex and layered reading time experience, captured in its nuanced articulation by a rhythmic analysis of the students’ everyday practices, habits and affective responses.

Commonsensical as it may sound, reading takes time. Engaging with a text to interpret and understand it is time-consuming, and most of our respondents in this project discussed this. Reading seems to project an experience of oneself as a slow reader, followed by a feeling of guilt for ‘just’ reading.

Interestingly, clock time and phenomenological time appear to be juxtaposed in the reading process, creating conflicts and productive tensions for most of the PhD students in the project. For example, the students often welcome writing deadlines, as they create a linear rhythm that provides structure to their reading time. At the same time, the idea that reading should be done quickly and targeted to extract material for their thesis hovers over many participants, generating performance-related pressure and anxiety. Procedural aspects of reading, particularly managing volume and note-taking, are treated as a sign of success or failure, reinstating Rosa’s neoliberal equation of fast-winner, slow-loser in the accelerated, competitive academy (Rosa, Chapter 2 in Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017).

However, a deeper engagement with reading both opposes and coexists with this tendency, evoking the notion of Barthes’ idiorrhythmy (Dakka, 2024) to describe the process of discovering and imposing one’s own rhythm. This rhythm typically resists linearity and dominant structure, requiring slowness as a disposition or a mode of intense attention to oneself and the world through the encounter with text. Even more intriguingly, slowness as heightened focus and immersion often occurs within short and fragmented bursts of reading, strategically or opportunistically carved into the students’ everyday lives, resulting from an incessant act of negotiation over and encroachments with personal, professional, and institutional times.

The project explored, examined, and interpreted the rhythms and practices of reading in contemporary doctoral education along three axes: times (institutional, personal, inner, tempo, duration); spaces (physical, digital, mental); and affects as ways of relating (joy, guilt, anxiety, surprise, fantasy, etc). Together, these elements combine in unique and shifting configurations of dominant rhythms and idiosyncratic responses (rhuthmόs or idiorrhythmy), exposing the irreducibility of students’ experiences to harmful binaries (eg fast versus slow academia) while revealing the pedagogic affordances of a rhythmic and phenomenological analysis for contemporary universities. Spotlighting different approaches to reading, thinking, and writing enhances awareness of and attunement to developing one’s voice, listening and resisting capacity.

Fadia Dakka is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education at Birmingham City University. Her interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, sociology and theory of higher education. She is currently working toward theorising Rhythm as a form of ethics underpinning critical pedagogy in higher education. She recently received a BA/Leverhulme small grant (2024-25) to examine doctoral reading habits and practices in the UK and Norway.


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Ethicality in academic knowledge production

by Dina Zoe Belluigi

‘Research cultures’, and their problematics, have received sufficient attention to have been delineated various definitions by authoritative groups within the university/ research ecology in the United Kingdom, and amongst scholars in our field of enquiry. Raising questions about ethicality within research cultures, in a recent paper I explored dys/consciousness and its effects on research production and the formation of academic researchers. The focus of the empirical component was on one part which falls within the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland (NI).

How to conceptualise thinking and seeing for the study of UK universities?

The paper begins with a mapping of conceptualisations of consciousness. It does so through their application, by those who have studied dynamics of racism in universities and educational institutions in the United Kingdom and the USA. The mapping includes scholars’ arguments about the persistence of not unconscious but dysconscious racism, the limits of critical consciousness, the necessity for anti-racism, and the constraints to realising decolonisation, when faced with janiform approaches to structural, institutional and scientific racism in academia.

Methodological approach

The conceptual mapping served as a sensitisation device through which to explore academic research cultures, about enquiry on social groups who were and are marginalised due to perceptions of their ‘otherness’ to dominantly-placed Northern Irish groups. Difference is indexed through constructions of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘migration’, underpinned by whiteness.

A Critical Discourse Analysis, undergirded by Critical Race Theory, was undertaken of 200 published research items that related to this area of enquiry, which were found to extend from 1994 to 2022, and were spread across disciplines. These were sourced from the repositories of the research-intensive universities in Northern Ireland. Qualitative reflections enriched the analysis. These included the participation of the related academic-authors, and report-and-respond insights from institutional research officers, and non-academic partners of such studies (n=37). Combining these sources was to probe more deeply the ways in which such outlier practices of knowledge production reinforced, evaded or resisted dominant frames and norms of conduct.

Signs of dysconsciousness

The paper’s analysis unpacks 5 signs of what was interpreted as dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism in the context. The first sign was the under-study and under-funding of local research enquiry on/ about/ and by so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘migrants’. Secondly, were the skewed dynamics within the politics of participation and of authorship, wherein those studied were rarely positioned as authorities of knowledge produced. Thirdly, the ethicality of authors’ interests and motivations in undertaking such research were found to be complicated and undermined by strategic, and often self-serving, goals imposed by the academic research ecology. Problematics in the data collected and held by public authorities, was the fourth sign. The article culminates in the fifth sign: that the threats of risk, social sanction and double-speak related to such research, were not only exogenous to universities, but endogenous too.

Insights for further explorations

In the current neoliberal milieu, the enablers of research – such as funding, social validation or career rewards – were of such a techno-rational nature that the depth of theorisation, complexity and intellectual debate necessary to challenge the existing dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism remained under-supported. Moreover, the article confirms observations that – rather than enrich or catalyse criticality and plurality within the dominant formations of academic knowledge and of scholars – risk-avoidance of (perceived) controversial issues is compounded when institutions are situated within complicated local socio-political conditions. This places limits on, and indeed de-idealises, promotional social responsibility imaging of ‘anchor’ universities.

Participants’ counter-narratives provided insights about the production of enquiry despite, and in some cases because of, such dominant dynamics. Of interest is that many of the authors were women (in far higher proportions than the staff composition of those institutions); and many of the authors self-identified as migrant academics. In addition to external migrants to the British Isles, this included those from the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, providing a sense of how alienated ‘outsiders’ were often made to feel within that academic ‘community’. Avoiding hero narratives, the article points to the politics of authorial agency within academic practices when individuals negotiate insider-outsider, minority-majority dynamics of academic research cultures hostile to such enquiry.

The article concludes by raising questions about the mantle of ethical responsibility to justice, truth, and dissent within such constraining, homogenising conditions. While it is tempting to read this as an exceptional or peculiar case, references to related studies are included throughout the article to demonstrate that similar problematic dynamics within research cultures have been observed across university spaces in the Global North, and warrant further enquiry.

Professor Belluigi is a Council member of SRHE; Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation at Queen’s University Belfast; and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University.


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Reimagining higher education in the post-pandemic world

by Anastasia Olga Tzirides, Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope

Anastasia Olga Tzirides
Mary Kalantzis

Bill Cope

This is one of a series of position statements developed following a conference on ‘Building the Post-Pandemic University’, organised on 15 September 2020 by SRHE member Mark Carrigan (Cambridge) and colleagues. The position statements are being posted as blogs by SRHE but can also be found on The Post-Pandemic University’s excellent and ever-expanding website. This statement can be found here.

The COVID-19 pandemic led higher education institutions to rethink the way that instruction can occur under the newly established circumstances. Many universities in the US and around the world have resumed instruction in hybrid format that is based to face-to-face instruction, coupled with online portions. In the case both of fully remote and hybrid learning, the gold-standard for learning remains traditional face-to-face, where online is modelled on the pedagogical processes and instructional artefacts of face-to-face. In this post, we are presenting the main characteristics of a hybrid format in a big US Mid-Western University and we are providing five ways that could transform it to a completely online format. Not only would this address the current needs set by the COVID-19 crisis; it would also change the concept of higher education by addressing in new ways the needs and the characteristics of contemporary students.

In the selected case of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, given that the health safety circumstances would allow it, the hybrid format of instruction was chosen, considering the significant value of the residential experience for the growth and development of undergraduate students, the training and advancement of graduate students and the production of new knowledge and research.

For the modified on-campus delivery format, the administrators of this institution had to rethink classroom capacities, to accommodate less than 50 students, and better utilisation of the spaces in order to aim for safe instruction with social distancing. They also had to re-evaluate time schedules, by taking advantage of irregular times (eg Friday evenings) and days (eg Saturdays), as well as passing periods, between the start and the end of classes. Online sections were an inevitable addition to the courses, as most lectures would be delivered online and the discussion parts were aimed to be face-to-face. Moreover, the administrators re-structured the calendar of the 2020-2021 academic year, ending the semester remotely to minimize the returns of students on campus after break periods. In the area of course development, instructors were provided with professional development training in order to develop new course modalities deploying different techniques and approaches to online education.

As it can be understood, this is an example where the institution selected to use online education as supplementary to face-to-face by trying to migrate their traditional practices online without really taking advantage of the possibilities that online education can offer. We argue that online can be completely different, and with the right tools, potentially superior to in-person teaching. To reap the benefits of online learning, we need to abandon the current generation educational technologies—systems and processes that mostly do little more than reverse-engineer traditional classrooms. At the University of Illinois, we’ve been researching the transformation of in-person learning and developing and testing online learning solutions (Montebello et al, 2018;  Cope, Kalantzis and Searsmith, 2020)

Here are five reasons why we choose to teach online and why we would never choose to teach in-person again.

1. Scale Up Higher Education and Scale Down Its Costs

In order to make higher education available to all, even workers and people with domestic caring responsibilities, we need to reduce the costs of teaching and learning, by providing access to it without the necessity for the student to leave their communities and homes. This can only be achieved with online education as a thoroughly renovated version of distance learning, which would be affordable to people from all social and economic conditions.

2. Develop Pedagogies of Social Knowledge and Collaborative Intelligence

In-person instruction is considered so valuable by its supporters, due to the element of human interaction. Nevertheless, in lecture theatres we hardly ever see interaction among students and even in classroom discussions, only one person is talking, and the rest have to listen. On the other side, with online learning and specifically with simple video lectures that contain prompts, students can engage in synchronous or asynchronous interactions below the videos in the platform used. Therefore, every student can comment and be part of the classroom discussion in this format. Moreover, learning analytics can track every learner’s engagement and this format is simply a far superior communication and pedagogical architecture than traditional in-person classroom interactions.

3. Create Pedagogies of Intense Engagement

In traditional models, learners are knowledge consumers and they demonstrate the acquired knowledge though end-of-course, summative assessments. In online learning architectures, it is possible to position learners as knowledge producers and co-contributors to knowledge communities. A simple way to do this is to have students research and make posts into the class activity stream that exemplify themes prompted by instructors. Another is to create peer-reviewed projects, where interim feedback in the knowledge production process comes from multiple perspectives: peer, instructor and machine feedback. Then projects can be published and shared by the instructor to the community as collective knowledge. Embedded, on-the-fly formative assessments can track community engagement and personal progress (Haniya et al, 2020). An example: in one of our recent 8-week courses with 54 students, using our CGScholar platform there were 14,500 pieces of actionable feedback on 3.3m datapoints, giving students and instructors a far richer and more reliable picture of learning than ever possible with a traditional test.

4. Focus on Higher Order Thinking

In the current world, the digital devices that we use everyday function as cognitive prostheses. They remember things for us, and they can provide us with a vast amount of knowledge that we don’t have to remember. So, the foundational objectives of education change. In reality, learning should be about careful navigation of at-hand knowledge resources and appropriate application of machine-supported procedures. Thus, the goal of education should be higher order thinking, including critical, creative and design thinking. Online environments can uniquely achieve this, by leveraging collaborative knowledge processes. Instead of individual minds, the social mind is acknowledged in the provenance of knowledge and the collaborative contributions of peers in the learning process. Artificial intelligence can track and offer suggestions on the basis of what we term “complex epistemic performance”. Machine learning works synergistically with human learning.

5. Lifelong and Lifewide Learning

Online learning, by contrast to the monastic origins of the residential experience of university and college education, can be embedded in the real world. It can be continuous, lasting for as long as life and stretching as wide as social and personal needs. The students in our online courses are in the world, contributing as partners in our knowledge communities and testing live in real-world contexts, the new things they have learned in our classes.

We argue that online instruction can be completely different, and with the right tools, it can potentially be superior to in-person teaching. The real problem is that none of the commercial or open source learning management systems can do what we have just outlined (check here for a comparison of the most popular learning management systems). Thus, in this time of crisis, we must seize the day and imagine a different future for higher education, by abandoning the back-to-the-future learning management systems and looking for or designing alternatives that address the future of education. With focused investment in people and technology we can renew and revitalize our pedagogical and social values. If nothing else, this crisis should lead to that.

Anastasia-Olga (Olnancy) Tzirides is a PhD candidate in the Learning Design and Leadership Program at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on exploring the potential of using digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence combined with a multimodal and translanguaging approach to language learning. Currently, she is as a teaching assistant for online graduate courses in the Learning Design and Leadership Program at the College of Education. In the past, she has worked as a graduate assistant designing online courses for the International Studies Program at the College of Education and as an instructor at the Modern Greek Studies program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Anastasia-Olga holds a master’s degree in “Teaching of Multilingualism and Linguistic Policies: Language and Culture Dissemination in Multilingual Settings” from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and Université du Maine, France, and a bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.  

 Mary Kalantzis is a Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She was from 2006 to 2016 Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before this, she was Dean of the Faculty of Education, Language and Community Services at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and President of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. With Bill Cope, she has co-authored or co-edited: New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (2nd edition, 2012); Ubiquitous Learning, University of Illinois Press, 2009; Towards a Semantic Web: Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research, Elsevier, 2009; Literacies, Cambridge University Press 2012 (2nd edition, 2016); A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, Palgrave, 2016; and e-Learning Ecologies, Routledge, 2017.

Bill Cope is a Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include theories and practices of pedagogy, cultural and linguistic diversity, and new technologies of representation and communication. His and Mary Kalantzis’ recent research has focused on the development of digital writing and assessment technologies, with the support of a number of major grants from the US Department of Education, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The result has been the CGScholar multimodal writing and assessment environment.