Afterword: histories of women’s higher education, time and temporalities

The Afterword focuses on the question of time and the temporalities, rhythms and tempos that thread through the special issue and and shed light on change, contingency and continuity as women sought to become and to be academics and to belong in the academy. I deploy a notion of multiple temporalities in which time comprises both a singular whole and specific fragments that flow with varying speeds and intensities to constitute what Suzanne Langer terms the volume of time. The discussion attends to two aspects of temporality that Elizabeth Grosz argues are important for understanding the production of conceivable futures: (i) inventing new ways of addressing and opening up new types of subjectivity and new relations between subjects and objects; and (ii) understanding and addressing the force of the past and the present in attempting to pre-apprehend and control the new.