Turning from Time to Space: Conceptualizing Faculty Work

Abstract

This chapter traces the overreliance on temporal frames in the scholarship on faculty work and offers a theory of space as an alternative frame. In order to counter temporal determinisms, Kuntz points to the unacknowledged spatial metaphors that abound in research on faculty and the new meanings that such spatializations make possible. He proposes a shift from time to space for research in higher education, involving first a critical awareness of our metaphors and, second, an inquiry into the social spaces and material places from which these metaphors emerge. In order to link social conceptualizations with embodied experience, Kuntz calls upon embodied metaphor as a theoretical heuristic and suggests possible avenues for understanding faculty work at the level of patterned daily practices within institutional spaces that produce professional identities. Finally, he ends the chapter with a series of methodological considerations for the practical application of the theoretical concepts that currently dominate research on space and place.