InFrame Project: Research Cultures and their Temporal Infrastructures

This talk explores how research cultures are shaped not only by spatial arrangements, collaborative possibilities, boundary crossings, and struggles for resources, but also by the temporal infrastructures that traverse all of these. Academic work unfolds across multiple, often competing temporal regimes—project timelines, funding cycles, career stages, institutional rhythms, and societal expectations. These temporalities rarely align; instead, research cultures are constituted through persistent asynchronicities across collaborations (whether with other researchers or with civil society), institutions, and global research infrastructures. Drawing on the concept of chronopolitics, I examine how these asynchronicities are not simply obstacles to be overcome, but sites of ongoing work. Researchers engage in practices of repair and maintenance to hold their research environments together, while also resisting some of these temporal expectations and pressures. Attending to these dynamics also means asking on what assumptions, familiar routines, and largely unexamined modes of thought these practices rest. Such questioning opens up possibilities for rethinking contemporary research cultures.

About the speaker

Ulrike Felt is Professor of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna and a leading scholar of research and innovation cultures and regimes of knowledge production. Her recent book Academic Times: Contesting the Chronopolitics of Research | Springer Nature Link explores the possibilities for more responsive, long-term and equitable academic futures.

About InFrame

This event is part of the InFrame Research Culture Catalyst project ‘Transforming Research: The effects of sharing facilities on cultures and outcomes’ funded by the Wellcome Trust. You can find out more about the project here: InFrame Culture Catalyst Fund: Round 2 Funded Projects.

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Host or Publisher College of Social Sciences, University of Glasgow