Losing Time, Making Do
Indonesian Early-Career Women Scholars’ Temporalities in Neoliberalising Higher Education
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12350704 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Asri Saraswati (0000-0002-0294-027X, University of Indonesia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 1-19 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Asian Studies Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1035-7823 • E-ISSN: 1467-8403 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10357823.2026.2640242 |
| OpenAlex | W7139033767 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 27 |
This article discusses the experiences and perspectives of Indonesian early-career women scholars in relation to time. I argue that the cultural and societal expectations for women academics to balance work and family, combined with the neoliberalisation of higher education institutions (HEIs) and scarce support, have shaped Indonesian women academics’ experiences with time. Tackling a high amount of work, administrivia, managerial work, and assigned care work in their institutions, as well as handling familial responsibilities, women academics face limiting temporal disciplining structures within which they also seek to cope. The article analyses in-depth interviews through the lens of disciplining structures and agency in cultural studies to present female academics as political subjects who assert agency in their experiences with temporalities in academia. The research sheds light on the temporal experiences of early-career women scholars and reconsiders the aptness of ‘slow scholarship’, a prominent concept in Global North academia, and considers it in the context of the Global South. The research highlights the participants’ awareness of the limiting temporal structures around them and the tasks that take time away from meaningful work. Highly cognisant of this issue, early-career women scholars deal with constraining structures, give meaning to their profession, and ‘make do’ with their conditions.
Higher education · Indonesian · Qualitative research · Temporalities · Work (physics · Asian Studies and History · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender, Feminism, and Media
Doing Good and Feeling Bad
Discipline and Punish
Slow scholarship for social work
Deferred time in the neoliberal university
Work–family conflict and coping strategies
Regional income disparities and convergence clubs in Indonesia
Negotiating and Rethinking Local Culture
A Call for Slow Scholarship
Neo-liberalism and the politics of higher education policy in Indonesia
The Micropolitics of Care in Indonesia’s Neoliberal Universities
From Ibuism to Pengabdian? Exploring Invisible Work among Women Academics in Neoliberalised Indonesian Higher Education
Slow scholarship, the slow city, and counter-visual practices
Gender and leadership in public higher education in South Asia
Conflicting Time Perspectives in Academic Work
Indonesian female academics and the pandemic
Reproducing Academic Insularity in a Time of Neo-liberal Markets
Optimism and Education
The time of their lives? Academic workers in neoliberal time(s)
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |