ABSTRACT
‘Invisible labour’ refers to forms of work that are not (fully) recognised as work – financially and/or symbolically. This chapter reflects on an ongoing project that aims to understand the kinds of invisible labour performed within academia and its impact on people who are tasked with performing it more than others. Creating an app that enabled academics to record their invisible work could, we hoped, help to address a hermeneutical injustice that obscures the status of these things as work. This project came with conceptual, methodological and political tensions, stemming in large part from how we were using time – and more specifically clock time – as our method. Reflecting on these tensions, we chart our attempts to enrich our ways of tracking labour, both through considering alternative notions of time as well as non-temporal methods. We conclude with a qualified defence of clock time; used as one method among many for capturing invisible labour, it can play an important role – particularly where it enables a playful subversion of the university’s own audit-culture.
