CONCEPT
Genuine vs. Gatekeeping Slowness
The distinction — pressed against Berg and Seeber by precarious academics and affirmed in their later work — between slowness that serves thought and slowness that protects privilege.
Gatekeeping slowness is the critical extension of Berg and Seeber's framework by scholars working from more precarious positions — adjunct faculty, contingent researchers, academics of color, early-career scholars without institutional protection. Their argument is that the defense of slowness, if pursued without attention to the distribution of its conditions, becomes a defense of the privileges that make slowness possible. The tenured professor defending her right to read timelessly occupies a position the adjunct cannot occupy; the scholar whose income does not depend on publication count can afford depth in a way the scholar whose contract renewal does cannot. The concept does not refute slowness but specifies the institutional conditions under which its defense becomes a defense of the existing hierarchy rather than a critique of it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The critique emerged forcefully in the years following The Slow Professor's publication, most prominently in essays by contingent faculty who noted that the book's prescriptions assumed material conditions — tenure, reasonable teaching loads,
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