Paper short abstract:

The paper confronts the increasingly popular plea for ‘slow science’ with the existing studies on the changing nature of academic temporality. It seeks to advance detailed empirically grounded topography of the intensification of academic life, which would inform various critiques of fast academia.

Paper long abstract:

The notion of 'slowdown' is at the center of - and accounts for notable antipode in - recently emerging debates about intensification of academia/scientific life. Probably the theoretically most advanced plea for securing a specific 'slow' temporal regime for academia/science that would differentiate it from faster cultures of politics, economics and media to date has been presented by Dick Pels in his book Unhastening Science (2003). While Pels supports his normative thesis by an extensive historical account of the development of science as an inherently 'slow' mode of knowledge production and of the gradual colonization of science's temporal culture by politics and economics since the latter half of the 20th century, his argument lacks a more detailed empirical scrutiny. Nevertheless, there has been a growing number of sociological and anthropological studies of closely related issues, ranging from empirical inquiries into contemporary 'publish or perish' culture, academic capitalism, the effects of commercialization of knowledge, exponential growth of published scientific papers and the growing number of predatory publishing practices, to analyses of the impact of ICTs on scientific conduct. The paper will confront the plea for the 'slowdown' of science with the existing studies and outline a more detailed and empirically grounded topography of the issue by identifying the key problematic areas and exploring the ways they are related to one another.