Can Higher Education Be Sustainable if Academic Lives Are Not? Care, Online Teaching and Non-Linear Academic Careers

1. Introduction

Sustainability has become a central concern in higher education. Its meaning has expanded beyond environmental responsibility to include social justice, institutional resilience, well-being and equitable participation [1,2,3]. This expansion reflects a broader recognition within sustainability scholarship that social sustainability—understood here in terms of equity, inclusion, justice and well-being within institutions and communities—is no less constitutive of sustainable development than its environmental and economic dimensions. Universities are increasingly assessed not only by what they teach or how they manage their campuses, but also by whether their practices contribute to inclusive and sustainable societies. Yet social sustainability also requires scrutiny of the conditions under which academic work can be sustained across a life course. Accordingly, this article treats academic careers, working time and caring responsibilities not as peripheral employment matters, but as constitutive dimensions of institutional sustainability.

Academic lives remain comparatively marginal within this expanded agenda. Research on sustainability in higher education has concentrated mainly on institutions, curricula, student competences, technologies and campus transformation [4,5,6]. Research on academic labour has, in parallel, documented intensification, precarity, deteriorating well-being and the erosion of boundaries between work and personal life [7,8,9,10]. These literatures have largely developed in parallel. As a result, universities may pursue sustainability while continuing to depend on forms of academic work that are difficult to sustain over a life course.

This article addresses that disconnection by asking what kinds of academic lives higher education makes possible. It argues that institutional sustainability must be assessed partly by whether academic participation can be sustained—or resumed—across caring responsibilities, career interruptions and changing life circumstances. This directs attention to the professional norm against which academic careers are commonly judged: continuous productivity, geographical mobility, rapid responsiveness and a capacity to give academic work priority over competing responsibilities. These expectations are often treated as neutral indicators of commitment. They are more accurately understood as conditions that are easier for some lives to meet than for others.

Drawing on feminist scholarship on care and social reproduction [11,12,13], the article treats care as a lens through which this inequality becomes visible. Motherhood, responsibility for children or ageing relatives, illness and other forms of dependency expose the extent to which academic institutions are organised around an implicitly unencumbered worker. Care is therefore not a separate topic added to academic sustainability. It provides a way of examining the temporal, spatial and relational assumptions embedded in academic work. It also helps explain why career interruption and geographical rootedness are frequently interpreted as individual deficits rather than as ordinary features of human lives.

Online teaching changes some of the conditions on which that professional norm depends. Teaching that is no longer tied to a campus can reduce the need for relocation and commuting and facilitate participation across institutions. Asynchronous teaching can further loosen the relationship between teaching and a fixed schedule. These possibilities are especially significant for academics whose professional participation must coexist with care. They do not, however, make online work inherently sustainable. Research on technology-enhanced and digital academic work shows that flexibility may also intensify workload, render its duration less visible, blur work–life boundaries and create expectations of continuing availability [14,15,16].

The distinction between online and asynchronous teaching is important throughout this article. Online teaching is used as the broader category for teaching conducted through digital environments, whether synchronously or asynchronously. Its principal relevance here concerns distance, place and geographical participation. Asynchronous teaching is one form of online teaching in which teachers and students are not required to be present at the same time. It is examined primarily in relation to time, written pedagogical communication, self-regulation and the distribution of workload.

The analysis adopts a conceptual and interdisciplinary approach rather than a systematic review design. It draws purposively on four intersecting bodies of literature: feminist scholarship on care and social reproduction, research on academic labour and non-linear careers, analyses of academic temporality, and literature on online and asynchronous higher education. These bodies of work are brought into dialogue to examine the spatial, temporal, relational and organisational conditions of academic participation. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive mapping of these literatures or to establish the prevalence of particular experiences, but to develop an integrated conceptual account of sustainable academic lives.

Within this conceptual analysis, three brief reflexive auto-socio-biographical vignettes provide situated points of departure for examining career return, the temporal organisation of asynchronous work and the modes through which pedagogical presence is produced. Auto-socio-biographical inquiry is used here to connect situated personal experience to the social and institutional relations through which it is produced, rather than to treat biography as a self-contained narrative [17,18]. The vignettes are not presented as representative evidence. Their purpose is to make visible mechanisms that extend beyond the individual experiences from which they arise.

The vignettes were developed through retrospective reflection informed by the author’s personal journals, which span the period preceding the career interruption through to the present. Entries are unevenly distributed over time, becoming particularly sparse during the early years of motherhood, when intensive care demands left limited time for sustained writing. The vignettes are therefore not reproduced as continuous diary records or treated as comprehensive documentation. They are reflexive reconstructions informed by contemporaneous notes and interpreted in relation to the conceptual concerns of the article. The unevenness of the record is not treated as evidence in itself, but provides relevant context for the temporal scarcity surrounding the experiences reconstructed here. Related publications have examined other dimensions of the author’s career interruption and its relationship to motherhood and academic identity [17,19,20]. The present article revisits this trajectory for a distinct purpose: to theorise the conditions of academic return, the temporal organisation of asynchronous teaching and the modes through which pedagogical presence is produced.

The article makes three related contributions. First, it conceptualises care as a test of whether academic work is sustainable across diverse lives and career trajectories, and reframes continuity as the institutionally mediated capacity to return after interruption. Second, it treats online teaching as a social infrastructure that redistributes possibilities for academic participation by altering the relationship between work and place. Third, it conceptualises asynchronous teaching as a temporal and communicative infrastructure that redistributes time, workload and responsibility for coordinating pedagogical interaction, while reconfiguring the modes through which academic presence is produced. Taken together, these contributions offer a care-centred account of digital academic participation: online flexibility does not simply expand access to academic work but redistributes the spatial, temporal, communicative and organisational conditions under which participation becomes possible.

The article first develops a care-centred account of sustainable academic lives. It then examines online teaching as an infrastructure of geographical and professional participation, before turning to asynchronous teaching as a temporal and communicative infrastructure. The final substantive section considers the institutional conditions required to prevent flexibility from becoming an individual obligation to cope.

2. Care and the Sustainability of Academic Lives

Assessing the sustainability of academic lives requires examining both the professional norm against which academic careers are evaluated and the temporal consequences of lives that cannot conform to it. Care makes that norm visible, while temporal justice draws attention to how its consequences accumulate across a life course.

2.1. Care and the Unencumbered Academic Norm

Academic careers are commonly narrated through merit, talent and cumulative achievement. Less visible are the assumptions about time, mobility and availability that define the conditions under which achievement is produced and recognised [21,22]. The ideal academic is expected to publish continuously, respond rapidly, travel when opportunities arise, relocate when necessary and remain institutionally visible [23,24]. Publication records and promotion criteria make outputs visible while often obscuring the unequal temporal, relational and material conditions under which those outputs were produced [22,25].

This norm is not usually imposed through a single formal rule. It is reproduced through recruitment, evaluation, workload allocation and everyday understandings of commitment. International mobility may be treated as evidence of excellence; career interruption may slow subsequent progression, weaken institutional visibility and, in some cases, make return itself more difficult; geographical limits may be interpreted as lack of ambition. The resulting model appears universal because the forms of support and freedom required to inhabit it remain largely invisible. What is presented as an individual capacity for productivity or commitment may depend on access to care, financial security, geographical mobility and the availability of others to absorb the demands of everyday life [26].

Feminist scholarship situates care within social reproduction: the paid and unpaid work through which people, relationships and everyday life are sustained and renewed [11]. Academic institutions nevertheless tend to operate as though care takes place elsewhere or can be delegated without consequence [12]. Higher education is not separate from the organisation of care. Its professional models have been developed around workers presumed to have limited caring obligations or sufficient private resources to prevent those obligations from affecting their availability for academic work.

Motherhood is one of the clearest sites at which this presumption becomes visible. Research on the motherhood penalty in academia has documented effects on publication, mobility, career progression and professional visibility [27,28,29]. Feminist analyses of interrupted academic lives and mental load further show how care shapes institutional legibility and the temporal and cognitive conditions under which academic work is produced [17,20]. Mothers may be expected to demonstrate unrestricted academic commitment while also carrying culturally intensified responsibilities for children and domestic life. The tension does not arise because motherhood is incompatible with academic work. It arises because academic work has been organised around lives treated as comparatively free from care.

Care extends beyond motherhood to include care for children, ageing parents, partners, relatives, communities and oneself [13]. Illness, disability, grief and dependency may reshape academic participation at different stages of a career. Recognising this range should not flatten the gendered character of care. Women continue to perform a disproportionate share of caring and domestic labour, and the institutional consequences of that distribution remain similarly unequal [30,31]. Motherhood is therefore neither the only relevant caring relation nor merely one example among interchangeable forms of care. It is a particularly visible site at which gendered expectations, dependency and academic norms intersect.

Care is not an additional personal circumstance to be accommodated after professional expectations have been defined. It is an analytical lens through which the temporal, spatial and relational assumptions of those expectations become visible. Academic sustainability cannot therefore be reduced to employment security or individual well-being, important as both are. It also concerns whether academic work can be inhabited over time without requiring individuals to suppress care, vulnerability and changing life circumstances. A system is not sustainable if continuity depends on workers having few responsibilities beyond work or privately absorbing every conflict between institutional time and lived time.

2.2. Temporal Justice and the Capacity to Return

The sustainability of academic lives is therefore also a question of temporal justice. Here, temporal justice concerns not only how much time academics have, but who can control its pace, sequence and organisation, whose interruptions are treated as legitimate, and what consequences follow when a life cannot be aligned with institutional time. Dominant academic career models imagine professional development as a linear process of uninterrupted accumulation: qualifications lead to appointments, appointments to publications and projects, and these, in turn, to progression. Care often follows a different temporality. It may be repetitive, unpredictable and organised around the needs and schedules of others. The resulting problem is not simply a shortage of time, but a misalignment between the temporal organisation of academic work and the temporal demands of care [32,33].

Academic time is consequently both unequally controlled and unequally valued. Some academics are able to accommodate fixed teaching schedules, meetings, travel and periods of intensified productivity within their lives. Others must repeatedly reconstruct working time around school calendars, illness, dependent relatives, financial constraints or parallel forms of employment. Under these conditions, formal access to an academic position does not necessarily amount to substantive access to academic participation. An opportunity may exist and yet remain practically inaccessible if its organisation presupposes geographical mobility, fixed-time availability or the absence of substantial responsibilities beyond work. The possibility of interrupting, slowing down and returning may therefore be as important to temporal justice as the formal right to enter and participate.

Misalignment between academic time and care does not produce a single outcome. It may lead academics to reduce their contracted hours, combine academic and non-academic employment, move into a different form of paid work, interrupt academic employment or leave paid work altogether. These outcomes should not be treated as equivalent, since each depends on different economic and relational conditions and carries different consequences for subsequent academic participation [34].

Reducing working hours may offer an alternative to interruption, but it is not an equally available or cost-free solution. Part-time academic employment may create time for care while reducing income and constraining access to research time, professional opportunities and career progression. Its feasibility depends on household resources, employment conditions and, crucially, whether workload is genuinely reduced in proportion to contracted hours [35,36]. Where expectations remain calibrated to full-time output, flexibility may preserve academic participation while transferring part of the economic and organisational cost of care to the individual.

The economic conditions under which academic employment can be interrupted are similarly unequal. Sustaining a period without paid work generally depends on personal savings, social protection or sufficient household income to absorb the loss of earnings; without these resources, interruption may entail substantial material hardship and increased financial dependence within the household. Research on extended career breaks among professional women shows that their duration and viability are shaped by household income and by relational arrangements concerning paid work and care [37]. Within academia, decisions to leave or remain are likewise embedded in family arrangements, caring responsibilities, employment insecurity and alternative employment opportunities rather than constituting unconstrained individual choices [34]. Where leaving paid work is neither possible nor desirable, departure from academia may instead involve a move into employment or self-employment offering greater control over location, schedules or workload. What institutions record as a voluntary departure may therefore constitute a care-driven reorganisation of paid work rather than a withdrawal from professional life. The capacity to sustain an interruption without severe material hardship is therefore itself classed and relational.

Academic interruption should consequently be distinguished both from labour-market withdrawal and from intellectual or professional disengagement. Time outside academia may involve care, paid employment elsewhere, entrepreneurship, consultancy, reflection, learning and the development of knowledge that conventional academic career metrics do not record [19]. Non-linear careers challenge the assumption that academic excellence develops primarily through uninterrupted institutional accumulation. Pauses and transitions may alter research questions, deepen reflexivity and generate practical, relational or epistemic forms of knowledge that would not have emerged within a continuous academic trajectory.

Recognising that interruption may reshape knowledge and professional identity does not require romanticising it or denying its material and professional costs. A reorganisation of paid work outside academia may preserve or even increase current income while offering conditions more compatible with care. Economic continuity does not, however, prevent the loss of institutional affiliation, academic status, protected research time, professional networks, career momentum and future opportunities [19,38]. An interruption may therefore be economically sustainable in the short term while remaining professionally costly and making subsequent academic return more difficult. Nor should the knowledge potentially developed during an interruption be used to suggest that care must produce professional value in order to be considered legitimate. Temporal justice instead requires evaluation systems capable of distinguishing chronological time from available academic time and of recognising contribution and potential across differently paced careers.

Academic return likewise resists binary categorisation. Re-employment does not necessarily signify complete or secure reintegration. Re-entry may be partial, gradual, precarious or distributed across academic and non-academic forms of work. Its sustainability depends on whether available academic roles can coexist with the material, professional and relational life constructed during the period of institutional absence.

Return should consequently be understood less as an individual achievement of resilience than as an institutionally mediated capability. The existence of a position does not, by itself, create that capability. Its location, workload, contractual security, scheduling requirements and expectations of availability determine who can realistically accept it, perform it and remain within it. The relevant question is not simply whether institutions permit individuals to return, but what forms of academic participation they make available to those whose lives no longer correspond—or never corresponded—to the uninterrupted career norm.

Continuity, in this sense, is not the absence of interruption but the capacity to return. Temporal justice therefore requires more than acknowledging that academic careers may proceed at different rhythms. It requires institutional arrangements that do not make interruption equivalent to permanent exclusion and that do not require returning academics to approximate an uninterrupted norm.

3. Online Teaching as an Infrastructure of Academic Participation

The institutionally mediated capacity to return developed in the previous section directs attention to the spatial and temporal conditions attached to academic work. Research on online higher education has largely foregrounded student access and engagement, instructional design, pedagogical innovation and institutional digital transformation [39,40]. Its implications for academics are less often examined as a question of sustainable academic participation. Yet teaching technologies organise more than instruction. They shape where academic work can take place, who can undertake it and which relationships between work, family and place become possible.

Conceptualising online teaching as an infrastructure of academic participation shifts attention away from technology as a neutral delivery mechanism. Infrastructure is relational and sociotechnical: it takes form through the interaction of technological systems, organised practices, institutional arrangements, competences and material support [41,42]. Infrastructures distribute possibilities. They enable some forms of participation, constrain others and operate differently according to the resources and relationships within which they are embedded. Online teaching can therefore widen academic participation without necessarily producing equitable or sustainable working conditions.

3.1. Geographical Rootedness and Re-Entry

Place-based universities have historically linked academic participation and career progression to proximity, travel and relocation. These mobility expectations are not equally manageable. Because caring labour remains disproportionately assigned to women, they frequently reproduce gendered inequalities [23,43]. Their exclusionary effects are not confined to women, however. Academics with sole or shared parenting responsibilities, dependent or ageing relatives, disabilities, chronic illness or strong community ties may be unable or unwilling to reorganise their lives around institutional geography. Remaining in place should not automatically be interpreted as limited ambition. It may be a necessary and legitimate way of sustaining care, personal well-being and professional contribution.

Online teaching can reduce dependence on physical proximity. Synchronous online teaching removes some geographical constraints while retaining scheduled presence, whereas asynchronous teaching does not require participants to be present at the same time [44] and may therefore create greater latitude over when some of the work is performed. The distinction matters because spatial and temporal flexibility address different barriers to participation. Their combination may be particularly significant when returning to academic work after interruption.

To examine how these conditions are lived, the following reflexive auto-socio-biographical vignette is drawn from the author’s own return to academic work after an eight-year interruption shaped by motherhood and care.

Reflexive vignette 1. After an eight-year interruption from academic employment shaped by motherhood and care, I would probably not have returned if doing so had required geographical relocation or regular presence on campus. Online teaching allowed me to work from home and remain in the same place, close to my children and established care networks. Its asynchronous organisation also enabled me to remain present in the ordinary routines of family life: taking my children to and from school, accompanying them to extracurricular activities, and responding to the daily unpredictability of care without having to reorganise our lives around fixed teaching hours. At this stage, my return to academic work was not full-time. I combined asynchronous university teaching with the online business that had supported me during my years outside academia. The return was therefore partial and gradual. Online provision removed the requirement of geographical mobility; asynchronous teaching created the temporal latitude through which re-entry became manageable. Neither erased care responsibilities nor restored the uninterrupted availability associated with a conventional academic career. Together, however, they allowed me to return to “my world” without requiring a radical rupture in personal and family life. (Reflexive reconstruction, June 2026)

The vignette gives situated form to the institutionally mediated capacity to return developed in the previous section. Online teaching preserved geographical continuity and proximity to established care networks; asynchronous organisation provided greater control over when teaching work was undertaken; and a partial appointment allowed academic work to be combined with the online business that had provided income and temporal autonomy during the interruption. Re-entry therefore depended not on a single form of flexibility, but on a particular combination of spatial, temporal and economic arrangements that enabled a phased rather than abrupt transition.

The vignette also complicates the equation between academic interruption and withdrawal from paid or professional work. What was interrupted was institutional participation in academia, together with the affiliation, protected research time, networks and cumulative recognition attached to it—not professional activity itself. Re-entry likewise did not involve the immediate replacement of non-academic work by a full-time academic position. It took the form of a hybrid recombination of academic and non-academic activity. The partial appointment was therefore both enabling and limiting: it created a bridge back into academia while falling short of complete or secure reintegration. Non-linear careers may, in this sense, involve successive reorganisations of paid work across institutional boundaries, with online and asynchronous teaching providing infrastructural conditions through which academic participation can be resumed without abruptly dismantling arrangements previously developed around care.

Seen in this way, online teaching is more than a convenient mode of delivery. It can form part of the infrastructure through which an academic position becomes inhabitable without requiring the individual to detach professional participation from family relationships, care networks and place. This does not mean that online teaching removes the costs of re-entry or that it offers a universal solution. Its enabling effects depend on the conditions attached to the position, including workload, contractual security, scheduling requirements, institutional belonging and expectations of availability.

These considerations extend beyond care-related interruption. Online arrangements may also support academics whose participation is affected by chronic illness or disability. Flexibility in place and time is not always a matter of convenience; it may determine whether teaching is possible at all. At the same time, online teaching can generate new accessibility barriers when platforms, workloads, communication practices or support systems are poorly designed [45,46]. Reduced dependence on physical presence does not, by itself, guarantee equitable participation.

3.2. Distributed Participation and International Cooperation

The same decoupling of academic participation from permanent relocation that can support care-responsive re-entry may also enable more geographically distributed forms of teaching and international cooperation. Academics may teach, supervise or collaborate across institutional and national boundaries while remaining embedded in local family and community networks. Such arrangements may broaden institutional recruitment, reduce some of the exclusionary effects of mobility requirements and enable institutions to draw on expertise that is not locally available.

This spatial redistribution is especially relevant to international cooperation, including development cooperation. Online provision can support joint teaching, professional development and exchange across countries without making sustained participation dependent on repeated travel [47,48]. Asynchronous components may facilitate collaboration across time zones and when participants cannot share a fixed schedule. Digital communication may also allow professional relationships to remain active between periods of in-person collaboration, extending access to resources, advice and collegial support beyond the duration of a formal programme [49]. Where financial resources are limited, online teaching and collaboration can reduce expenditure on travel and accommodation and support longer-term engagement. They do not eliminate the costs of cooperation, but redistribute them towards connectivity, equipment, coordination, local facilitation and digital labour.

Reduced dependence on travel does not, however, dissolve the inequalities within which international cooperation takes place. Cross-border digital participation is shaped by unequal access to connectivity, equipment, technical expertise and locally appropriate forms of support [48,49]. It is also shaped by inequalities in funding, time, language, institutional recognition and decision-making power. Online collaboration can reproduce extractive relationships if expertise and authority flow predominantly in one direction or if temporal, pedagogical and technical costs are borne disproportionately by less-resourced partners [48,50]. Participation may be geographically distributed while power remains institutionally concentrated.

These conditions show why infrastructures of possibility are not automatically infrastructures of justice. Online provision becomes relevant to development cooperation not simply because it connects geographically distant participants, but because it may support reciprocal relationships sustained over time. Realising that potential depends on material access, equitable recognition of partners’ knowledge and contributions, and meaningful participation by all partners in determining the purposes and organisation of collaboration. It also requires reflexivity among participating academics about their own assumptions, the contextual adequacy of their practices and what they themselves learn through cooperation [51].

Online teaching is thus a social infrastructure as well as a pedagogical one. By altering the relationship between academic work and place, it redistributes possibilities for re-entry, geographically rooted participation and cross-border collaboration. Whether that redistribution supports sustainable academic lives depends on employment security, access to institutional communities, workload recognition and the material conditions under which online work is performed. Spatial flexibility may make participation possible, but the sustainability of that participation also depends on how academic time is organised. That temporal dimension is particularly visible in asynchronous teaching.

4. Asynchronous Teaching as a Temporal and Communicative Infrastructure

Building on the spatial possibilities examined in the previous section, asynchronous teaching adds a distinct temporal and communicative dimension to online participation. Because teachers and students are not required to be present simultaneously, some teaching activities can be organised across a wider range of times. This may create significant possibilities for academics whose professional work must coexist with care, illness, disability or other constraints on fixed-time availability. It does not, however, remove the need for temporal organisation or pedagogical presence. Rather, it changes how these are produced, redistributing responsibility for organising time, communication and availability.

The analysis therefore moves from academics’ control over working time, to the temporal distribution and recognition of teaching labour, and finally to the communicative modes through which pedagogical presence is constructed.

4.1. Temporal Flexibility, Self-Regulation and Boundaries

For academics responsible for children or other dependent family members, as well as those whose participation is shaped by chronic illness, disability or other constraints on fixed-time availability, the possibility of organising work across different times and away from campus, often from home, may make professional participation more manageable. Some teaching tasks can be paused and resumed, concentrated around periods of availability and undertaken without additional travel. Teaching may be organised around school schedules, medical appointments, unpredictable care, fluctuating health needs and other demands that cannot simply be moved outside working hours. These features can make academic participation possible where fixed campus schedules or synchronous online classes would be difficult to sustain [46,52].

Temporal flexibility should not, however, be confused with an absence of temporal organisation. Fixed classes, classrooms and commutes provide external structures that mark beginnings and endings. When these structures weaken, academics must decide when work begins and ends, plan and sequence tasks, determine which interactions require prompt attention, monitor student participation and protect time for care, health and professional activity. The capacity to pause work in response to other demands may be highly enabling, but work that can be performed at any time can also expand into every available time. Research on digitally connected professional work describes a comparable autonomy paradox: technologies that initially increase control over when and where work is performed may contribute to collective expectations of continuing accessibility [53]. Autonomy does not eliminate structure; it relocates responsibility for producing it.

This relocation becomes particularly consequential when academic work is undertaken from home. Boundaries may blur spatially because professional, personal and caring activities unfold within the same physical environment, even when separate rooms are available. More decisively, they may blur temporally because messages, forums and learning platforms remain accessible beyond conventional working hours. The disappearance of scheduled presence may then generate an expectation of continuing accessibility, particularly where institutional norms regarding response times, platform monitoring and weekend availability remain undefined. What enables different dimensions of life to coexist may simultaneously make it difficult to protect any of them from the demands of the others [14].

Asynchronous teaching consequently requires considerable self-regulation, but this should not be treated as a fixed personality trait that determines who is naturally suited to this form of teaching. Planning, boundary-setting and availability management are competences that can be developed, but their exercise is supported or undermined by workload, staffing, course design, institutional timetables and expectations of responsiveness. Readiness for online teaching is shaped by structural and cultural conditions as well as by individual competence or disposition [54]. Where academics have limited control over these conditions, flexibility can become an individual obligation to manage competing and potentially continuous demands.

Asynchronous teaching therefore resists simple descriptions as either liberating or exploitative, reflecting the wider finding that flexible working can coexist with work intensification [55]. Its consequences depend on whether academics have meaningful control over time, whether boundaries are institutionally protected and whether the work required to sustain flexibility is recognised. The same temporal flexibility that makes participation possible can deepen inequality when responsibility for coordinating work, care and availability is left primarily to the individual.

4.2. Temporal Asymmetry and Invisible Labour

The sustainability problem concerns not only who must coordinate flexible time, but also where teaching labour falls within the temporal life of a course. The labour associated with asynchronous teaching follows a temporally uneven pattern. It may be concentrated before students enter a course, distributed across interactions of varying duration and intensity during delivery, and extended beyond the formal teaching period through assessment, follow-up and revision. Because this work is not concentrated within scheduled class hours, significant parts of it may remain difficult to identify through conventional workload measures [56,57].

To give situated form to this temporal asymmetry, the following vignette draws on the author’s experience of designing and subsequently teaching an asynchronous university course.

Reflexive vignette 2. Several months before my formal teaching contract began, I had already invested substantial work in designing an asynchronous course: selecting and sequencing resources, writing instructions, creating activities and imagining how students might respond in the absence of immediate oral explanation. The course had to be substantially constructed before students entered it; it could not begin to be designed only when the visible teaching period started. Once the course opened, that concentrated preparation was replaced by a more dispersed form of labour involving interaction, monitoring and feedback. Some interventions were brief, but others required reading extended student reflections, following developing discussions and composing detailed responses. Assessment and revision continued after the planned learning activities had ended. The period during which students and teacher were visibly interacting therefore captured only part of the labour required to make the course possible. (Reflexive reconstruction, June 2026)

The vignette shows not simply that asynchronous teaching involves substantial work, but that the work through which flexibility is produced is displaced across time. A course can offer students latitude over when they participate because its structure, resources, instructions and possible learning pathways have been designed in advance. Online teaching scholarship similarly identifies design and organisation as constitutive dimensions of teaching presence rather than as preliminary technical tasks external to teaching itself [58,59]. What appears as flexibility during delivery is therefore partly enabled by an earlier concentration of pedagogical labour. Asynchronous flexibility is not simply provided through technology; it is constructed through anticipation.

Anticipation has a distinct pedagogical function in asynchronous environments. In face-to-face or synchronous teaching, an unclear instruction can often be repaired immediately through oral explanation, observation of students’ responses or spontaneous reformulation. In asynchronous teaching, the teacher must attempt to anticipate possible interpretations, questions and difficulties before they arise. This does not remove the need for subsequent interaction, but changes the relationship between design and delivery. Some explanatory, organisational and relational work that might otherwise occur in real time must be embedded in the learning environment before participation begins [60].

The labour performed during delivery is differently organised but not necessarily lighter. Online instructors may spend substantial time reading and assessing written work, providing feedback, responding to messages and sustaining discussion, even when no scheduled class is visible in the timetable. Research comparing online and face-to-face teaching does not produce a simple conclusion that one modality invariably requires more total time than the other. It does, however, show that time is distributed differently and that evaluation, written communication and interaction may require greater investment in online environments [57,61]. The relevant issue is therefore not only the total number of hours worked, but which activities are counted, when they occur and whether their variable intensity is recognised.

Conventional workload models often fail to capture this temporal architecture. Models organised primarily around scheduled contact hours privilege visible and synchronised activity: they record when teachers and students encounter one another, but not necessarily when the conditions for that encounter are constructed. The resulting problem is more than a general underestimation of workload. It is a misalignment between pedagogical time and contractual time. The pedagogical life of an asynchronous course begins before student participation and continues beyond the most visible period of delivery, while contracts and workload allocations may recognise only the interval in which the course is formally open.

When a teaching contract begins only as students enter the course, the prior labour required to create the online learning environment must either be compressed into an unrealistic period, performed before employment formally begins or absorbed as unrecorded work. Similarly, when contractual or workload recognition ends with the teaching calendar, assessment, student follow-up and course revision may be displaced beyond recognised working time. Institutions may therefore benefit from a temporally extended process while formally recognising only its most visible phase. Academic workload models have already been identified as a significant barrier to the sustainable implementation of technology-enhanced learning, particularly when they fail to register the work undertaken by those responsible for its pedagogical enactment [15].

Recognising this full temporal sequence is part of institutional adaptation to online education. Where employment and workload arrangements remain organised primarily around the student-facing teaching period, the flexibility made available to students and institutions may be subsidised by labour displaced beyond the boundaries of contracts and workload allocation. This temporal asymmetry exposes the limitations of workload arrangements that recognise the visible delivery of teaching while overlooking the labour through which that delivery is made possible.

4.2. Written Pedagogical Communication and Modes of Presence

The anticipatory labour described above is also communicative. Although asynchronous environments are not exclusively text-based, they often depend heavily on written pedagogical communication. Scholarly writing does not automatically prepare academics to formulate concise instructions, anticipate misunderstandings without immediate oral repair, explain complex ideas accessibly or create relational presence through written feedback. Academic expertise and pedagogical communication are related but distinct competences. Research on online teaching similarly shows that effective practice requires communicative, pedagogical and relational capabilities that cannot be reduced to disciplinary expertise or technical proficiency [62].

These communicative demands concern the modes through which academic presence is produced and recognised. Face-to-face and synchronous teaching commonly make a teacher’s presence visible through immediate, oral, embodied and public performance. Asynchronous teaching does not eliminate presence; it reconfigures it. Within established online learning frameworks, teaching presence encompasses the design and organisation of the learning environment, the facilitation of discourse and direct instruction, while social presence concerns participants’ capacity to become recognisable to one another as socially and affectively present members of a learning community [58,63]. In asynchronous teaching, these forms of presence may be produced through the clarity of written explanations, carefully structured activities, attentive reading of student contributions, appropriately framed questions and feedback provided across time.

The temporal organisation described in the previous section was accompanied by another, less immediately visible change: asynchronous teaching reconfigured the mode through which pedagogical presence could be produced. The following vignette reflects on this dimension.

Reflexive vignette 3. Returning through asynchronous teaching unsettled a distinction I had long made between research and teaching. I had understood myself as someone who preferred research, but the distinction was not so simple. I enjoyed teaching, yet found the continuous visibility of face-to-face teaching—speaking for extended periods, occupying the front of a room and responding in real time—disproportionately demanding. Research had offered another mode of academic presence: quieter, mediated primarily through reading, reflection and writing. Asynchronous teaching brought these modes of academic work together. I could teach through writing, feedback, questioning and carefully designed activities without teaching becoming synonymous with continuous public performance. What initially appeared to be an alternative mode of delivery also became an environment in which my preferred ways of thinking and communicating could become pedagogically productive. (Reflexive reconstruction, June 2026)

This situated experience points towards variation that extends beyond the individual case. For some academics, text-based communication supports reflection, precision and the careful formulation of ideas. It may provide time to consider responses and reduce the demands associated with continuous or simultaneous social interaction. For others, face-to-face interaction provides energy, professional belonging and immediate pedagogical information. The reduced availability of spontaneous oral explanation, visible student reactions and real-time adjustment may make asynchronous teaching more difficult, effortful or isolating. These differences should not be interpreted as indicators of greater or lesser commitment, nor as evidence that one modality is inherently more inclusive. They demonstrate that academics do not experience visibility, proximity, interaction and distance in identical ways. Academic sustainability may therefore depend not only on where and when academics are able to work, but also on the modes through which they are expected to be present.

Questioning has a particularly important role within written and temporally distributed teaching and has been conceptualised as interconnected with critical thinking and creativity within a broader account of higher-order intellectual capacities [64]. Questions and prompts must perform some of the work that, in synchronous settings, can occur through real-time explanation, follow-up and adjustment. The pedagogical consequences of questioning depend not simply on the number of questions asked, but on their functions, cognitive demands and relationship to broader teaching strategies [65]. Carefully designed questions can activate prior knowledge, structure inquiry, invite reflection, connect conceptual content with experience and sustain dialogue across time. Conversely, questions that do not adequately communicate their purpose or the expected form of engagement may generate superficial responses, confusion or silence that cannot be immediately identified and addressed. Research on Moodle discussion forums further suggests that technology does not in itself foster student questioning; participation depends on how question-generating activities and the conditions surrounding them are pedagogically structured [66]. The design of questions therefore forms part of the anticipatory and often invisible labour of asynchronous teaching. Questions are not simply vehicles for eliciting answers; they help establish the cognitive and relational conditions through which participation develops.

The written and temporally distributed character of asynchronous teaching may also create conditions for systematic reflection on pedagogical practice. Instructions, questions, feedback and patterns of interaction leave traces through which teachers can revisit their decisions, identify difficulties and develop questions about teaching and learning. This may bring teaching and research into closer relation through forms of scholarship of teaching and learning grounded in pedagogical practice [67], including empirical inquiry into how students perceive teaching, learning and assessment contexts and how those perceptions relate to their approaches to learning [68]. Such traces do not, however, become research data automatically. Their use for research requires appropriate consent, ethical review, data protection and careful attention to the power relationship between teachers and students.

Yet the existence of persistent written traces does not in itself guarantee either teaching or social presence. Presence depends on the quality, intelligibility, responsiveness and relational meaning of communication rather than simply on its frequency. Written communication can create connection and recognition, but it can also become formulaic, overwhelming or experienced as surveillance when participation and responsiveness are excessively prescribed. Distance is therefore neither inherently isolating nor inherently protective; its consequences depend on how interaction is designed, interpreted and institutionally supported.

This variation helps explain why capacity for asynchronous teaching cannot be inferred from disciplinary expertise or scholarly writing alone. When institutions assume that academics can transfer existing practices directly into an asynchronous environment, the work of developing new communicative, pedagogical and relational practices becomes an individual responsibility. Differences in previous experience, confidence and communicative preference may then be interpreted as personal suitability or deficiency rather than as part of the conditions under which asynchronous teaching is organised.

Asynchronous teaching is thus a communicative as well as a temporal infrastructure. It depends not only on when teaching takes place, but also on how explanations, questions, relationships and forms of presence are constructed when participants do not share the same moment. Its sustainability depends on whether institutions recognise different legitimate modes of academic presence and support the temporal, pedagogical and communicative work through which those modes become possible.

5. Discussion: From Individual Flexibility to Institutional Responsibility

Taken together, the preceding analysis reframes flexibility not simply as an individual attribute, but as a property of institutional arrangements. Online teaching, understood as a social infrastructure, can redistribute possibilities for academic participation across place, while asynchronous teaching, as a temporal and communicative infrastructure, can redistribute working time and enable different modes of pedagogical presence. These arrangements do not merely remove constraints. They also relocate the work of temporal coordination, boundary-setting, anticipatory design and communicative presence. Care makes visible who is able to absorb these responsibilities and at what personal, professional and economic cost. The sustainability of flexibility therefore depends not simply on whether it is available, but on how agency, labour and organisational risk are distributed between institutions and individual academics.

Flexibility becomes unsustainable when institutions treat it as an individual advantage while leaving academics to manage its costs privately. Under that model, individuals must establish boundaries, organise care, maintain productivity, develop online pedagogy and prevent burnout without corresponding changes to workload or institutional expectations. Flexibility then becomes an obligation to cope.

One requirement of a care-responsive institutional approach is adequate workload recognition. Models based primarily on scheduled contact hours should account for course design, preparation, written feedback, moderation, individual support, monitoring, assessment and revision. Work undertaken before formal teaching begins or outside the contractual teaching period should not remain invisible simply because it precedes or follows student participation. Workload allocation must reflect the temporal asymmetry of asynchronous teaching rather than assuming that teaching labour occurs only during delivery [15,57].

Institutions must also protect temporal boundaries. Expectations regarding response times, weekend availability and platform monitoring should be explicit and realistic. Academics should not be required to demonstrate commitment through continuous digital presence. An institutionally protected capacity to disconnect is particularly important when professional and domestic life share the same physical environment. Temporal flexibility is sustainable only when academics retain meaningful control over availability rather than remaining permanently reachable. Without such protection, the autonomy associated with flexible work may be converted into an expectation of continuing accessibility [14,53].

Pedagogical infrastructure is equally important. Professional development should address written communication, questioning, teaching and social presence, accessible design and the organisation of interaction across time. Mentoring, collaborative course design, realistic production schedules and access to pedagogical and technical expertise can prevent anticipatory and communicative labour from being left entirely to individual teachers. Such support also challenges the assumption that online teaching is simply conventional teaching delivered through a platform and recognises that effective online pedagogy requires communicative, relational and design capabilities in addition to disciplinary and technical expertise [59,62].

Institutional responsibility also applies to the spatial redistribution enabled by online teaching. In cross-border teaching and development cooperation, reduced dependence on travel supports sustainable participation only when connectivity, coordination, digital labour, recognition and decision-making power are equitably distributed among partners.

Institutional responsibility must also extend beyond the organisation of teaching to the evaluation of academic careers. The first vignette illuminates one possible trajectory that conventional career models tend to obscure: interruption of academic employment does not necessarily entail withdrawal from paid or professional work. Leaving academia may involve a reorganisation of paid activity into employment, self-employment or hybrid forms of work offering greater compatibility with care. What appears institutionally as exit may therefore be a relocation of professional activity beyond the university, while return may take the form of a gradual recombination of academic and non-academic work rather than the restoration of exclusive academic employment. Online and asynchronous teaching can function as a bridge within this process by enabling academic participation to resume without requiring the immediate abandonment of work arrangements previously developed around care.

Recruitment and progression systems should consequently recognise interruptions, part-time work, re-entry, geographically rooted participation and hybrid professional trajectories without treating them as evidence of reduced ambition or commitment. Career systems designed around exclusive and continuous institutional attachment may fail to recognise both the knowledge and capabilities developed during periods outside academia and the legitimacy of partial or distributed forms of re-entry. Academic contribution may develop across different rhythms and through several institutional and professional relationships. Recognition of this plurality does not require lower standards. It requires standards that do not confuse one biographical pattern with excellence itself.

The vignettes used in this article illuminate possible mechanisms rather than establishing their prevalence or effects across academic populations. Further research should examine how online and asynchronous arrangements shape interruption and re-entry across different contractual positions, caring relations, experiences of illness and disability, disciplines and institutional contexts. Particular attention is needed to who gains meaningful control over time, whose flexibility depends on invisible or unpaid labour, and which modes of academic presence institutions recognise and reward. Research should also examine hybrid trajectories involving movement between academic employment, other forms of paid work and self-employment, which remain poorly captured by binary models of academic exit and return.

There is no single sustainable model of academic work, online teaching or academic presence. Some academics flourish through asynchronous rhythms, written interaction and distributed participation; others depend on campus presence, collective routines, spontaneous dialogue and face-to-face relationships. Many require different arrangements at different stages of their lives. Institutions should therefore avoid treating visibility, immediacy and synchronous verbal performance as universal indicators of engagement or commitment. Institutional sustainability depends not on imposing flexibility as a universal solution, but on supporting meaningful variation without making security, belonging or recognition conditional on conformity to a single professional, biographical or communicative ideal.

6. Conclusions

Higher education cannot be sustainable if the lives that sustain it are organised around exhaustion, invisible care and expectations of uninterrupted availability. Bringing academic lives into sustainability debates changes the question from whether universities can endure to how they distribute the conditions of endurance among the people who teach and research within them.

Care reveals the limits of the dominant academic norm. Motherhood and other caring responsibilities make visible the dependence of continuous productivity, geographical mobility and institutional availability on lives presumed to be comparatively unencumbered by such responsibilities. Non-linear careers are not anomalous versions of academic life, but trajectories shaped by human relationships, vulnerability and change. From this perspective, continuity lies not in avoiding interruption but in preserving the capacity to return. That return need not be immediate or involve complete and exclusive reintegration into academic employment; it may instead take the form of a gradual and hybrid recombination of academic and non-academic work.

Online teaching can function as a social infrastructure that redistributes opportunities across place by reducing dependence on relocation and enabling re-entry, geographically rooted participation and international cooperation. Asynchronous teaching can function as a temporal and communicative infrastructure, enabling work to coexist with care and different rhythms while reconfiguring pedagogical presence through anticipatory design, written explanation, questioning, feedback and interaction across time. These arrangements are not sustainable by virtue of being flexible. They redistribute not only opportunities, but also labour, responsibility and organisational risk.

The sustainability of these arrangements therefore depends on institutional choices. Workload models must recognise preparation and distributed interaction; temporal boundaries must protect academics from permanent accessibility; pedagogical support must prevent the privatisation of course design and communicative labour; and career systems must legitimise interruption, partial participation and return. Flexibility is sustainable when it expands agency without transferring its costs primarily to individuals. A socially sustainable university is therefore not one that requires all academics to achieve uninterrupted continuity or inhabit academic work in the same way. It is one that preserves the capacity to participate, interrupt and return across different relations to care, time, place and academic presence.