Beyond Interruption: Care, Epistemic Distance and the Temporal Politics of Academic Value

Academic careers are commonly evaluated through temporal norms that privilege continuity, acceleration and cumulative output. Within such regimes, care-related non-linearity is often framed as interruption, absence or reduced productivity. This article develops a feminist conceptual analysis of care, time and academic value, drawing on care ethics, feminist epistemology and scholarship on academic labour, to challenge this deficit framing. Rather than asking only how care constrains academic participation, it examines how care-shaped trajectories expose the assumptions through which productivity becomes academic value. The article advances three arguments. First, it distinguishes care as relational ontology, social practice and epistemic orientation, arguing that care reshapes not only the conditions of academic work but also the forms of attention and knowledge-making it can sustain. Second, it conceptualises academic productivity as a temporal and epistemic value regime that shapes what kinds of knowledge become recognisable and institutionally valuable. Third, it introduces epistemic distance as a temporally produced condition through which assumptions of academic value become available for critique. The article contributes to feminist debates on academic labour by shifting analysis from participation to epistemic recognition, showing how care-related non-linearity reveals what academia is willing, or unable, to know under dominant productivity regimes.