Venture Academics

Sociology and Communications are hosting Dr Filip Vostal (Department of Science Studies, Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences) for this month's seminar series. See his abstract below.

There has been much debate in recent years that institutional life of academia is ‘accelerating’, that scholars need to keep up with abounding expectations, rampant demands associated with new forms of assessing and monitoring, and churning out as many papers and grant applications as possible. Next to the anxiety epidemic resulting therefrom and the armies of academics who resist and question the meaningfulness of scholarly pursuit under this regime, there is also a new academic subjectivity this regime generates: a persona resembling activities and mindset of a venture capitalist. This emerging subjectivity rewards risk-taking, crude pragmatism, ruthless competitive spirit, impudence, capital accumulation, branding, exploitation of various cash-generating opportunities and subordinates particularly when it comes to the construction of academic portfolios mobilised for capital accumulation. In this talk, I argue that this prototype of ‘fast’ academic, actively reproducing the epistemic and academic capitalism, accounts for a new normal. However, at the same time, I will also claim that the rival – ‘slow’ academic, which is currently in vogue – cannot in any way compete or replace the new normal of fast and agile venture academic.

Filip Vostal received PhD in sociology from the University of Bristol, UK in 2013. From 2014 he has worked as a researcher at Department of Science Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of Czech Academy of Scíences. He has published his work in journals such as Time & Society and European Journal of Social Theory. Filip is the author of Accelerating Academia: The Changing Structure of Academic Time (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) and currently runs a project that anthropologically investigates temporality of knowledge production in physics (funded by Czech Science Foundation). He teaches science & technology studies at the Charles University, sociology of time at the University of Vienna and social theory at the Anglo-American University in Prague.