By Riyad A. Shahjahan
My recently published conceptual paper “Am I a Scholar” began with a keynote invitation.
I’d been asked to deliver a keynote at an international forum I hadn’t attended in some time. The theme was “I Am a Scholar.”
But as I sat with that phrase, it didn’t settle in very well. The certainty of it felt out of step for me. My experiences have been shaped more by ambiguity, deferral, and unease than by self-assured claims of “I am a scholar”.
Finding an anchor in clock time
At the time, I was immersed in a book project on the role of time in global higher education. I was working on the chapter on the history of clock time. That inquiry, into the colonial and capitalist foundations of standardized time, soon became the anchor for my keynote.
However, it was not an easy process to find the anchor.
As I reflected further, I realized that the keynote could become a bridge for several areas of my work that had previously lived in different silos. I could draw from the history of clock time, my research on radical self-care, and my writing on academic labor and temporality, particularly in Global South contexts. Yet I wasn’t entirely sure what connected them all.
The question “Am I a scholar?” became a conceptual entry point. Gradually, I began to realize that this question wasn’t just existential – it was also temporal. It was shaped by the logics of clock time, by institutional metrics of success, and by assumptions of who gets to be seen as legitimate, timely, and productive. In this way, the history of clock time offered an important grounding.
Weaving together other threads
This was where my work on academic labor and temporality also fit. I had explored these issues in relation to scholarly burnout, demands, and the uneven structures of academia. Still, I hadn’t yet fully connected that back to the history of clock time.
Intuitively, I felt that radical self-care was the missing piece — not as a wellness trend, but as a mode of temporal refusal. A way of rejecting institutional demands for constant output, speed, and visibility. But I was still figuring out how to weave all of these threads together.
That became the heart of my inquiry: how can one paper hold together so many pieces — theory, history, personal narrative, and political critique?
In more traditional academic writing, the boundaries between empirical, theoretical, and conceptual work are tightly drawn. You either collect data and analyze it, or you build theory from existing literature, or you write a conceptual piece that maps categories and definitions.
But a keynote was not meant to fit any of those molds neatly. It was hybrid: reflective and analytical, experiential and rigorous. It resisted easy classification.
Like much of my writing, it began with lived experience — a delay, a denial, a small moment that stung. And from that point, it unfolded outward, not to vent or confess, but to understand how power lives in time — in institutions, in expectations.
The questions that stirred in me included:
- What does it mean to be considered a scholar in academia amidst clock time?
- What does a “scholar” mean across racialized bodies?
- How is clock time colonial — disciplining who gets to succeed, and who is always seen as “behind”?
From these questions, the writing moved through theory, scholarship, history, and affect. What emerged was a map of entanglements — of self and structure, of voice and violence, of refusal and becoming.
From keynote to journal article
The keynote was well-received. I had thoughtful engagement from the audience and was later invited to present it again to colleagues elsewhere.
Yet writing it up for a peer-reviewed journal article was another journey.
I was fortunate to be invited to submit something for the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Higher Education. I asked them if I could perhaps send them a polished version of my keynote. They agreed.
Writing for the inaugural issue of this new journal gave me the freedom to experiment — an invitation to explore form. But then came the peer-review.
One reviewer accepted the piece without changes. Another raised crucial concerns: was I essentializing temporality across contexts? Was I stereotyping time cultures in the Global North and South? They reminded me that clock time is not uniquely European — that it has been taken up and shaped in many places, in different ways.
This pushed me to clarify: Which clock time was I critiquing? What histories, what violences, what assumptions?
Why this kind of writing matters
Looking back, I see how powerful — and necessary — this kind of conceptual writing is, especially for those of us who have long existed at the margins of academic legitimacy. As someone who mentors graduate students and early-career researchers, I encourage them to see that writing which mixes theory, history, personal narrative, and political critique can be a form of survival. And also, of world-making.
But it can feel risky.
Students often ask: Can I really write like this? Will it be taken seriously? Is this academic enough? These aren’t just questions about form. They are questions about power — about who gets to be heard, and how.
As mentors and colleagues, our task is not to shut down these questions, or rush to reassure them. Instead, we need to hold space for them. We need to show students how to write reflectively and critically: to see their positionality not as a disclaimer, but as a method; to engage theory not as external authority, but as dialogue; and to use narrative not as illustration, but as knowledge.
Writing in the in-between
Ultimately, writing this conceptual piece “Am I a Scholar” — a hybrid product of a keynote, part reflection, part political intervention — reminded me that some of the most meaningful scholarship emerges from the in-between: from discomfort, from contradiction, and from asking the questions no single discipline can answer on its own.
And it also reminded me of the courage it takes to write what doesn’t yet fit — but still matters deeply.
Photo by Yaniv Knobel on Unsplash