Introduction

‘Lack of time’ is perhaps one of the most persistent expressions of anxiety in academic work today (Crang, 2007; Gill, 2014; Vostal, 2016). It is an affective illustration of a dog chasing its tail; no matter how hard we push, we rarely ‘get things done’ (Allen, 2001; see also Gill, 2010; Gregg, 2016, 2018). The relentless pondering over whether we did enough is, on the one hand, brought about and catalysed by the precarious employment settings and fierce competition within contemporary academia (Gill, 2014, 2017; Brunila and Hannukainen, 2017; Allmer, 2018; Brunila and Valero, 2018). On the other hand, the unsettled self-talk is a part of a vicious circle that gives rise to self-reinforcing experiences of insufficiency (Gill, 2010; Mannevuo and Valovirta, 2019; see also Chapter 8, this book). This affective composition is clearly structural, that is to say, somehow beyond personal, but it is still experienced individually, as if it were in researchers’ own hands to rationalise their working patterns so as to cope with impending rhythmic dissonances.

Individualised attempts to optimise work processes, to straighten out confused rhythms and to compensate for the chronic lack of time by working more ‘efficiently’ go hand in hand with the general evolution of academia into a huge measuring machine (Burrows, 2012; Murphy, 2015). With quantified academia, I refer to the meticulous efforts of standardising and measuring the inputs and outputs of scholarly activities as well as organising academic work with the guidance of these measurements (Crang, 2007; De Angelis and Harvie, 2009). As sociologist Roger Burrows (2012) describes, this trend of ‘metricisation’ is expressed in the roles that ‘numbers … are playing in our contemporary constitution as “academics” ’ (2012: 356; original emphasis).

In this chapter, I examine the affective dynamics of quantified academia through a particular subset of scholarly work: academic reading. Throughout history, reading has kept its place at the unquestionable core of academic proficiency and professional identity, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Reading is a curious case in point, as it seems to challenge the general trajectory towards the ‘quantification of everything’ (Dyson, 2013).