Contributing to the post-pandemic university project

What sort of university will emerge from this crisis? If you’re interested in helping us answer this question then we hope you might consider contributing to our project through one of our current calls for contributions:

  1. Tell us about your experience of adapting fieldwork for the pandemic as part of our podcast series
  2. Analyse the issues involved in a return to face-to-face conferences as Covid restrictions eventually ease
  3. Explore how the pandemic is reshaping the disciplinary landscape
  4. We’d love to learn about your home office setups for remote teaching
  5. Contribute a lockdown diary to raise awareness of the similarities and differences in our experience of working under these conditions
  6. We’re also open to general contributions on themes relating to the post-pandemic university

If you’d like to discuss a potential contribution then please get in contact using this form.


Photo by Amanda Lins on Unsplash

2 comments

  1. HI Mark – hope all is as guid as can be with you an yours, given present crazy contexts

    I think I was in touch before to say, while I thought the Post-Pandemic University project was so worthwhile and a lot of great work is being done and shared through that, I had real worries with the ‘Post-Pandemic’ aspect of the title

    As, been trying to write a wee bit about that – the below perhaps more clearly expresses my concerns (as posted on fb with the latest call

    While – I have an issue with the term ‘post-pandemic’ in such contexts – given that claims for a ‘return to normal’ or a ‘new normal’ that are framed in terms of a post-pandemic university or post-pandemic society more broadly, are seriously mistaken or deceptive/manipulative.

    The realities are, that given present policies/measures and action/inaction and little likelihood of a transformative change of course, actually intended to address the root causes of this and other zoonotic disease pandemics, COVID-19 will not only be a continuing problem, more worryingly, there is an inevitability that other pandemics are likely to follow. ‘[T]he world is now in an “era of pandemics”’, which will emerge more often, spread more rapidly, and be more deadly (IPBES, 2020). With experts warning that the next pandemic could arrive at any time. It’s not a question of if there will be another pandemic, but when.

    As such, it would seem likely that what we are facing with respect to the university – given HE’s disaster capitalists seizing of the cover and excuse provided by the covid crisis, as an opportunity to double down on HE’s existing trajectory, to intensify and accelerate processes of its neoliberalisation – is an ever more neoliberalised and neocolonialised, PANDEMIC university???

    – that said, the use of that terminology aside – there’s some really great work being done by this project

    ‘What sort of university will emerge from this crisis? If you’re interested in helping us answer this question then we hope you might consider contributing to our project through one of our current calls for contributions:

    Tell us about your experience of adapting fieldwork for the pandemic as part of our podcast series

    Analyse the issues involved in a return to face-to-face conferences as Covid restrictions eventually ease

    Explore how the pandemic is reshaping the disciplinary landscape

    We’d love to learn about your home office setups for remote teaching

    Contribute a lockdown diary to raise awareness of the similarities and differences in our experience of working under these conditions

    We’re also open to general contributions on themes relating to the post-pandemic university

    If you’d like to discuss a potential contribution then please get in contact using this form.

    Work like you don’t need money Love like you’ve never been hurt and dance like no-one’s watching

    “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” Richard Shaull (foreword to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

    “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable.” Hannah Arendt (The Crisis of Education)

    “it is impossible to imagine a future unless we have located ourselves in the present and its history; however, the reverse is also true in that we cannot locate ourselves in the present and its history unless we imagine the future and commit to creating it” (Anna Stetsenko, 2015).

    “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out” Vaclev Havel

    ________________________________

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    1. It hadn’t occurred to me it might be read like that to be honest. I agree with what you’re saying & to me ‘post-pandemic’ signifies that things are changing, probably not for the better. Certainly not suggesting the end of pandemics, only the end of this as a socio-political event.

      Like

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