Acceso usuarios
Hamza R'boul
This article examines the chronopolitics of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) in Moroccan higher education, introducing three novel and interlinked concepts. First, it conceptualises ‘temporal infrastructuring’ as the multi-faceted process through which policies, reforms, and institutional instruments construct, impose, and naturalise a temporal order. Second, it diagnoses the ‘geotemporal bind’ as the resulting structural dilemma, referring to the entrapment of a system, structure, policy, institution and/or individual in navigating different and competing timescales driven by irreconcilable logics and objectives. The analysis reveals how EMI policies, through temporal infrastructuring, reproduce a geotemporal bind, as postcolonial universities are entangled in contradictory positioning because they are concurrently compelled to develop according to Anglo-neoliberal speed (Scopus-indexed publication, global rankings) while grappling with bureaucratic temporal legacies of former colonial regimes (slow accreditation systems, exclusive automatic equivalency for certain degrees) and the sidelined local temporalities (cyclical, event-based). Third, the article argues that this bind sustains a condition of the ‘never-yet-postcolonial’ in which the promised break with coloniality is perpetually deferred. The article demonstrates that policies and institutional temporal cultures function as sites of chronopolitical governance. For instance, the successive reforms, characterised as unsuccessful, exemplify this temporal politics as accelerated internationalisation timelines and colonial validation procedures were simultaneously mandated, while failing to account for local conditions, needs, and aspirations. The cascading relationship of these concepts, in which temporal infrastructuring produces the geotemporal bind, which in turn sustains the never-yet-postcolonial, provides a new framework for understanding how the governance of academic time marginalises local epistemes and impedes (post)(de)colonial futures.
