We aim to decenter the Global North knowledge production about time in higher education (HE) by introducing and applying a culturally sustaining concept of shomoyscapes. While the Bengali word “shomoy” literally means “time,” it goes beyond “clock time” and also refers to memories, present moments, feelings, a particular duration, and/or signifier for a temporal engagement. A shomoyscape entails a complex temporal landscape of different temporal categories, constraints, agencies, and to various degrees, embodies hybrid times (i.e., modern time coexisting with non-linear local/traditional time). Drawing on interviews and participant observations with 22 faculty in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we demonstrate the efficacy of shomoyscapes by illuminating how faculty experience, contest, and manipulate their time(s) amid rapid socio-economic transformations of Dhaka, an urban, Global South mega city. We show how shomoyscapes manifest as faculty experience temporal constraints, such as (a) traffic, (b) party-based university politics, and (c) caring for others. We suggest that Bangladeshi faculty experience and navigate shomoyscapes that are constituted by both larger temporal constraints (spatial, structural, or relational) and their temporal agency in response to these same constraints. Using a temporal lens, we contribute to a more in depth understanding of the experiences of faculty working and living in an urban, Global South context, highlighting how life “outside the academy” spills over into working “inside the academy,” rather than vice versa. We argue that shomoyscapes offer a useful temporal heuristic to help contextualize human/social relations in different arenas of social life that would otherwise remain invisible.

This article seeks to decentre the Global North knowledge production about ‘work–life balance’ (WLB) in academia by applying a temporal gaze to illuminate WLB possibilities in Bangladeshi academia where institutional WLB policies are absent. Drawing on Adam’s ( 2008 ) timescapes and Flaherty’s ( 2002 ) time work concepts, we focus on Bangladeshi women faculty’s experiences as an example of how a temporal gaze can help illuminate the interrelationships between time, gender, and life transitions underlying women faculty accounts of WLB in a Global South context. Drawing on the narratives of three Bangladeshi women faculty in different career stages and family statuses, we probe how women faculty manipulate, control, or customize their temporal experience (i.e. temporal agency) in response to local gendered norms and life transitional episodes (e.g. separation, academic mobility, illness, and/or retirement). We demonstrate how WLB is not a static outcome, but a work-in-progress, and that a temporal lens helps illuminate multiple time work strategies that emerge during life transitional episodes. We argue that a temporal lens troubles the outcome (quantitative, clock-oriented) and spatial orientation of WLB practices, as our participants constantly blurred work/home boundaries refracted across social positionality, gendered norms, and relationships. By examining the temporal dimensions underlying WLB, we contribute a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships between academic/personal life, various roles, and temporality in a South Asian context.