Freedom postponed? Project funding and imagined futures

Jonatan Nästesjö (HALMSTAD University)

Recently, the costs of competition in research funding have become a subject of debate. Competitive funding promises to identify and support excellent research, yet critics have questioned the time and resources consumed by the competition itself. But another cost may be harder to see: the research we keep leaving for later in order to stay competitive.

Perhaps you recognize the promise. After the next publication, there will be time to explore that question. With a grant of our own, we can finally pursue our own ideas. Once we have a permanent position, we can take a few more risks. This points to a familiar way of thinking about academic work and careers: present compromises are acceptable because they prepare the ground for greater freedom later. There are things to finish and expectations to meet. The research contribution that matters most can wait until the conditions are right.

But what if staying competitive keeps pushing the right moment further into the future?

In my research, I have explored how early career academics in history and political science at Swedish universities navigate academic careers. Drawing on in-depth interviews, I have become particularly interested in how the futures they imagine shape the choices they make – what they work on, what they set aside, and which compromises seem worth making. This brings a temporal dimension of academic freedom into view: how does the prospect of greater intellectual freedom later shape the research scholars pursue, and postpone, today?

In Sweden, junior scholars often spend years on temporary contracts, while permanent academic positions can offer little or no allocated research time. These conditions make researchers across career stages dependent on competitive external funding to secure research time, with particularly high stakes for junior scholars on fixed-term contracts. For this group, obtaining their own grant can fund their position, reduce their dependence on senior colleagues, and help them establish an independent research agenda. Among the early career academics I interviewed, funding success was also seen as an important mark of recognition. Securing grants was therefore understood as opening up a future not only in research, but in academia more broadly.

Yet, these opportunities depend on demonstrating achievements that support further investment. In project-based careers, a project operates on two timescales: it must enable research now and help secure the conditions for research later. Interviewees described how this could mean choosing questions that existing data and methods could answer quickly, or avoiding certain topics, publication formats, or collaborations whose results might take too long to emerge. The next competition can thus shape – or constrain – epistemic decisions long before the current funding runs out.

^{Source: Elena Samigulina / unsplash}

The promise of later

One way of managing this tension between present demands and scholarly ambitions is through postponement, that is, setting aside what one wants to pursue in the expectation that career advancement will create room for it later. As John, a historian I interviewed, explained:

At times, I feel like such a typical postdoc, absorbed by this instrumental mindset. […] But it’s like, ok, if I do this properly, if I can deliver results now, then I will get the chance to do it differently in the future.

For him, that future promised a slower pace and more attention to the work he valued most.

These decisions can be entirely reasonable. Early career academics cannot assume that another opportunity will follow if their current work fails to produce enough recognizable achievements. And the promise of greater freedom gives accommodation a purpose: what might otherwise feel like a departure from one’s scholarly commitments is justified as a temporary career strategy for realizing them.

In this way, postponement helps early career academics maintain a sense of who they are and want to become. When everyday decisions conflict with their understanding of what is really worthwhile, locating those commitments in the future can preserve a coherent account of themselves. Indeed, research on imagined future selves shows how aspirations make present organizational demands easier to accommodate. Scholars can thus remain critical of prevailing expectations while continuing to meet them, because advancement appears to offer a route towards greater employment security and room to exercise scholarly judgment. As Foucault might remind us: the desire for freedom can help keep us on schedule.

When later becomes later again

But what happens when that career advancement – a grant of one’s own or a permanent position – actually arrives?

An independent grant can expand control over a research agenda. It also comes with an end date. A permanent position can offer employment security while leaving much of one’s time committed to teaching. Further applications therefore remain necessary. Greater independence may also bring responsibilities for collaborators or junior colleagues whose employment depends on continued funding. Success changes the terms of dependence without necessarily removing the pressures that prompted postponement. This reflects the dynamic of epistemic capitalism: researchers must continually accumulate publications, recognition, and funding that strengthen their capacity to secure further research opportunities.

Project-based funding reproduces the conditions for postponement within this cycle. By allocating resources in finite periods and making renewed access depend on further demonstrations of achievement, it is a funding regime that keeps researchers oriented towards future competitions. Those who secure funding may thus gain intellectual authority without gaining the continuity needed to pursue the commitments they had previously deferred.

This pattern is one of recurrent deferral. Postponement expresses an expectation: do this first, then pursue that. Recurrent deferral identifies how funding and career regimes repeatedly renew that sequence, even as scholars secure grants and advance in their careers.

Making time for (what) research

What does this mean for research itself? A question or topic does not have to be rejected as unimportant to disappear from the work being undertaken. It can remain valued while losing priority to something more urgent or more readily recognized. Learning an unfamiliar approach, revisiting an unresolved problem, or developing a book-length argument may require time that is difficult to reconcile with the next application deadline. This does not mean that deferred research would necessarily have been better. It means that funding arrangements help determine which questions receive attention and which forms their pursuit can take.

Postponement and acceleration – the pressure to produce more in less time – are connected here. Postponement can arise across disciplines, but its forms depend on how research is organized. In many fields within the social sciences and humanities, research relies heavily on sustained individual work: reading, interpreting sources, developing arguments, and writing. Adding more people to a project cannot readily compress these processes. Under pressure to demonstrate results quickly, work that requires sustained engagement may therefore be particularly vulnerable to postponement.

Still, postponement is not inevitable. Funding, supportive relationships, and protected research time can enable scholars to pursue previously deferred commitments. The issue is how funding regimes make these conditions available and sustainable.

For debates about academic freedom, this means attending to how funding organizes time and shapes relations of intellectual dependence. Researchers need resources and authority over their use, together with sufficient continuity to pursue questions whose significance emerges slowly or whose outcomes are uncertain. Funding arrangements influence how far ahead researchers can plan, how soon they must demonstrate results, and what happens when an inquiry takes an unexpected direction. This is also a question of research quality, as funding arrangements shape which scholarly practices and ideals researchers have time to cultivate – and which remain ambitions for the future.

How might other ways of funding research change these conditions? Would longer funding periods create room for exploration or move the same pressures further into the future? What possibilities would more dependable research time within academic positions open up? Could forms of institutional or collective funding allow questions to develop across successive projects without repeatedly having to establish their value in advance? And whose priorities would determine how that time is used? These questions also invite us to consider how funding regimes shape, and are shaped by, academic career systems and the ways in which scholarly contributions are valued.

Different funding regimes may create different dependencies, but they can also make different research futures possible.

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