The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the extent to which the Internet has become a critical infrastructure necessary for a country to function. Not unlike railways and motorways, the digital infrastructure is a vital enabler of interactions and connectivity (Peters, 2017). The pandemic helped to further roll out this infrastructure in an unprecedented way, including in the sphere of education.  Credit Suisse Senior Portfolio Manager Kirill Pyshkin refers to the impact for education as a “Netflix moment” (Credit Suisse and Fiinancial Times, 2020).  Pyshkin, like many others, expects digital providers to disrupt traditional ways of providing education as Netflix did to the film industry a few years ago, and highlights the new investment opportunities that this transformation of education is likely to create. Taking a more critical stance, Ben Williamson and Anna Hogan showed in a recent study how for-profit-providers, in particular the five usual suspects – Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent), Facebook and Amazon, have indeed seized the opportunity to further expand the “hidden infrastructure” in the sphere of education (Williamson and Hogan, 2020).

What Williamson and Hogan’s, otherwise very informative, study overlooks is the geopolitical dimension of the development they scrutinize. Almost all the for-profit providers Williamson and Hogan list in their study are located outside Europe, reflecting a more general unequal distribution of the digital infrastructure. Eight out of the top ten publicly owned firms are located in the USA, none of them in Europe (see Forbes). An estimated 92 % of data produced in the Western world is currently stored in the USA and only 4 % in Europe, reflecting a geographically very unequal cloud market (see Kalff et al. 2019). The geopolitical dimension of the digital infrastructure has only recently gained public attention with the ban on Huawei’s 5G network technology, and most recently with the US banning of the Chinese-owned social media platforms TikTok and WeChat (Ruehl and Kynge, 2020; Sevastopulo, et al., 2020). All these bans were justified in the name of national and economic security. They are designed to prevent China and other countries from obtaining personal data, conducting espionage and interfering in elections. What the newspapers seem to have forgotten is the fact that the US government itself has a long tradition of using the new technology for its own espionage. The most prominent example is certainly EternalBlue, the name given to the spyware the American National Security Agency (NSA) created to exploit a point of vulnerability in Microsoft software and to expand its surveillance. Only when the spyware was leaked in 2017 and turned into the WannaCry ransomware, causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage, did the NSA’s activity become public; the project was eventually abandoned (Whittaker, 2020). The capacity of the US government to use the digital infrastructure for its security policy has been further amplified by the 2018 US CLOUD Act. This new law grants extensive extra-territorial authority to US law enforcement agencies to obtain data.

The unequal distribution of the digital infrastructure has caused major concerns within Europe, since it risks jeopardising Europe’s own efforts to digitalise its economy and society in its own way. For instance, it sets clear limits to the reach of the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as Facebook demonstrated when it moved more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law to its servers in California in reaction to this important strengthening of private data protection (Hern, 2018). The unequal distribution also deprives European governments of important revenue, since it allows non-EU tech giants to generate revenue in Europe without paying much in the way of taxes. The attempt to create digital taxation, avidly embraced by France,  has recently faltered, partly under US pressure and partly due to technical difficulties (Heikkilä and Braun, 2020). And which European government wants its population to imagine itself as a nation based on the knowledge provided by foreign education providers? With its major efforts to advance digitalisation, the European Union (EU) thus risks creating new forms of vulnerability that undermine its very own project of regional integration. It is in this context that the term digital sovereignty has gained momentum.

Digital sovereignty – an oxymoron?

The term sovereignty is not uncontested. In a recent publication, Frances Burwell and Kenneth Propp of the Transatlantic Council expressed their concern that it may stand for an attempt to bolster Fortress Europe, and reminded their readers that the United States and the EU are each other’s top trading partner and invest heavily in each other’s economy. Other commentators see it as a barely disguised attempt by EU member states to take back competences they have delegated to the EU, following the British example (see for example The Economist). There is indeed a paradox informing the term. It was digitalisation that drove the final nail into the coffin of the Westphalian order, the idea that nation states are independent entities in full control of themselves. It might be this paradox that has made this term so useful for the EU, whose integration project also challenges the Westphalian notion of the nation state. The term makes it possible to imagine the EU as an entity large enough to have the political weight to tame the “transnational private authority” (Hartmann, 2018) of the giant firms whose revenues exceed the national income of many nation states, and powerful enough to be taken seriously by big governments like the USA and China.

The EU’s uphill battle

There is a broad understanding that the European countries have missed the first wave of digital transformation (see, e.g. Hobbs, 2020). The newly elected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, put it as follows in her outline of her agenda: “It may be too late to replicate hyperscalers, but it is not too late to achieve technological sovereigntyin some critical technology areas.” (Von der Leyen, 2019: 13). Accordingly, the digital strategy of the EU focuses in particular on some key dimensions of digital infrastructure, like the improvement of connectivity using 5G technology, the creation of an alternative to the Global Positioning System and the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The European Parliament promises to “adhere to high ethical standards with the aim of becoming a global leader in responsible and  (i.e. with consumers and users ultimately favouring EU-compliant products) to catch up with the US or China in the race to develop AI” (European Parliament, 2020: 3). The way the Parliament puts it is interesting. The emphasis on responsibility and trust is clearly designed to get European consumers on board, and this in turn would strengthen the EU’s economic aspirations on a global scale. Another, closely related cornerstone of the digital agenda is the creation of a Common European Data Space where “public and private sectors have easy access to huge amounts of high-quality data to create and innovate”, as the European Commission highlights in the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence. The development of learning analytics, still in its infancy as the Commission regrets, is a key feature of this agenda. Collective efforts between the member states shall help to collect big data and to use learning analytics to capture, analyse and use data with a view to improving education, so the plan.

But why should education institutions as well as their respective governments agree to share their data in such a politically sensitive area as education is? Here we get a sense of the Achilles heel that the EU digital project has where its needs trust and a broad alliance to gain legitimacy. It is not a coincidence that a leaflet recently published by the EU for a non-specialist audience puts trust at the centre of its vision of Europe’s digital future.

Open Educational Resources: David defeating Goliath?

It is in this context that we might see a strengthening of the efforts to promote open source software and open educational resources as part of the new Digital Education Agenda of the EU. It might become for the Common European Data Space what a responsible and trustworthy AI is for European developers and manufacturers, i.e. a comparative advantage; or to put it in more political terms: the concession the powerful actors driving the EU digital agenda have to make in order to gain support for their endeavour.

Open educational resources differ from open access that the EU has predominantly promoted so far. Open Access seeks to avoid that users pay twice to have access to journals publishing results of publicly funded research. In other words, Open Access does not address copyright issues, and hence the key issue of ownership. It rather focuses on the methods of funding and accessing research or other works. Conversely, Open Educational Resources (OER) is related to work that copyright owners have “opened” by adding either a Creative Commons or other License that removes some copyright restrictions.  This arrangement allows to  “retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute” information, to use David Wiley’s 5 Rs, without asking for permission, provided that the work is attributed to the copyright owner and credit is given if appropriate (Fitzgerald, 2007). The issue of OER was of no high priority for the EU so far. Only few projects had been funded. EU publications on the topic tend to relate OER mainly to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in order to address non-formal learning and its recognition (Inamorato dos Santos, et al., 2016; European Commission, 2013). As a consequence, important questions about ownership are essentially avoided which are key for the revise, remix and retain where contextual creativity comes in.

EU under pressure

I expect the pressure on the EU to move OER up on its digital education agenda to come from two different sides:

Support from “below”

Firstly, OER as well as open source software have become key priority for a number of EU member states in the sphere of education. A case in point is Germany who is not only a strong advocate of digital sovereignty and currently presiding the European Commission. Its major effort to advance the digitalization of its universities as well as schools, funded by billions of Euros, gives clear priority to open source solutions for software and content (for an overview, see Hochschulforum Digitalisierung and an excellent GEW study). This priority also informs the spending of the millions of Euros the German government had made available at short notice for moving teaching at schools and universities online amidst the pandemic, given the open source movement a major boost. 

Support from “above”

The second reasons why I expect the EU to move OER up on its agenda are UNESCO’s support of the OER movement. UNESCO plays traditionally an important role in bringing like-minded actors from within Europe and beyond together. The role of the UNESCO Lisbon Convention for the Bologna Process helping to establish a European Higher Education Area is a prime example (Hartmann 2011). UNESCO has become a key platform for bringing proponents of OER together: first on the occasion of its first OER World Conference in 2012 in Paris, followed by a number of regional conferences and a second World Conference in Ljubljana in 2017. These activities have paved the way for the UNESCO Open Education Resources (OER) Recommendation adopted by the General Assembly in November 2019. An OER Dynamic Coalition had just been created commissioned with the task to support the implementation of the recommendation.

Conclusion: predicting the future

It might be, in other words, not only for-profit providers who heavily benefit from the pandemic, as the Williamson/Hogan study suggests. I would argue that the pandemic has equally strengthened the open source movement. It might be the concession that powerful European players keen on advancing a digital agenda are ready to make in order to gain broad support for their undertaking that wants to be an alternative to the “giant firms” (Crouch, 2010) from other parts of the world.

Like any prediction about the post-pandemic world, this conclusion has a speculative element since we are still in the middle of the pandemic.  However, I hope I have provided some important evidences that support my case. A first indication whether my prediction is accurate will be the next Digital Education Agenda of the EU due in a few weeks. Some initial statements by the president of the European Commission, the German politician Ursula von der Leyen, seem to support my case. But my analysis is, like the power struggles I examined, work in progress.

Independently whether my prediction will come true or not: What I hope to have achieved with this contribution is to remind us to pay more attention to the heterogeneity of the developments we scrutinise. Without nuanced analyses, we may jump to conclusions or even strengthening the tech giants by presenting their hegemonic project as the only winner of the pandemic crisis. As an unintended consequence, we risk pushing competing projects that have some emancipatory potential out of the public attention that they need to gain momentum. We researchers not only analyse social reality, we also co-constitute it.

This blogpost is based on a more detailed analysis that is forthcoming: Eva Hartmann: Geopolitics goes viral: The digitalisation of the post-pandemic education landscape, currently under review.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Eva Hartmann is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge/UK. Her works seeks to contribute to international higher education (IHE) studies by advancing an interdisciplinary perspective interrelating International Relations, critical state theory and the sociology of IHE. She has widely published on the educational dimension of the European integration as well as of international politics. Her most recent research project focuses on the rise of a transnational private authority in the sphere of education creating new territories of centrality.

Can a crisis act as a stimulus to change in higher education?

Historically, crisis can indeed stimulate educational change. Prussia had lost to Napoleon in 1807, their humiliation becoming embodied in the Treaty of Tilsit, so the efforts of Wilhelm von Humboldt from 1809-1810 to create the University of Berlin were rooted in a crisis of defeat not victory. Von Humboldt’s conception emphasised three unities, summarised by Pritchard:

• The unity of teachers and learners
• The unity of research and teaching
• The unity of knowledge

In 1972, initiated in the wake of les événements  of 1968 and at a time when there were huge stresses across the world arising from the ends of empires on the one hand, and social tensions within Western societies in particular, UNESCO produced a global vision of education with four humanistic assumptions:

1. Common destiny
2. Democracy
3. Complete fulfilment of humanity
4. We should no longer assiduously acquire knowledge once and for all, but learn how to build up a continually evolving body of knowledge all through life—’learn to be’. 

The aims of universities

We might summarise typical modern aims for universities as continuing the lineage of von Humboldt and UNESCO:

• Researching to develop new knowledge
• Teaching to help fulfil the potential of learners in secure, just, tolerant and sustainable democratic societies

In 2004, Manuel Castells addressed the roles of universities after receiving an honorary degree from City University, London:

I would say that there’s one major reason why universities as autonomous entities are essential – because the university is the last remaining space of freedom. There’s no other space in society, no other, that has not submitted to the power of bureaucracies or government or politics or to market forces. 

Now we may decide that it’s okay, that we don’t need spaces of freedom and that market forces will take care of everything. But if we do think that we need this space of freedom it’s only the university that can provide it. No other institution guarantees it at this point.

While some might say this space of freedom has been widely eroded in many countries since 2004, for many this remains of profound significance. But that freedom is also burdensome. The university has to be prepared to be the critic of last resort.

Twentieth century crises – did universities get a pass mark as critics of last resort?

We have endured three massive and avoidable global crises in just 20 years: 

2000: Financial crash with economic and social impacts

2007: Financial crash with economic and social impacts 

2020: Health pandemic with economic and social impacts

In all three cases there were individuals and groups in universities who forecast the crises, and who developed ways to have avoided them, or reduced their impact. Some aspects of the crises, particularly the financial ones, were actually stimulated by methods engineered in universities. But the university sector as a whole clearly failed to act as the critic of last resort, especially after the 2000 crash when it was only a short time before a second version took place.

Universities cannot take all the blame, of course. The creation of the crises, and problematic responses to them, all represent profound and growing society wide deficits in wisdom, deficits which have grown considerably due to the speed of communication of mis-information in the internet era. 

It would be difficult to argue that universities have failed in their everyday disciplinary research and teaching. There has been a massive growth in higher education. Huge advances have been made across all disciplines, within those disciplines, both in terms of the research and improving methods of teaching. So we are not being critical here of the everyday activities of universities. Our critique relates to how universities have addressed the big picture issues facing society, especially what became known as  “wicked problems”. And in particular, we would argue that universities have lost sight of the importance of wisdom as opposed to knowledge and skills. Wisdom has been well understood for millennia. Practical wisdom (phronesis) was proposed by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, as one of the key categories of “intellectual virtues” alongside knowledge (episteme) and skills (techne).

The big difference from Aristotle’s time is that practical wisdom is now needed not simply by the elite, but by the population as a whole. The 1972 UNESCO report, points out, for example: “progress … in education and the spread of information, radically changes fundamental aspects of democratic practice”. And they conclude, “democratic education must become a preparation for the real exercise of democracy”.

While there have been admirable localised innovations to develop “preparation for the real exercise of democracy” in individual schools and institutions, the sector has a whole has sleepwalked through growing democratic deficits, despite having not simply the freedom that Castells identified, but also an implied duty to take advantage of that freedom. The continued challenges to “secure, just, tolerant and sustainable democratic societies” have been absent from the agendas of most institutions and most national groupings of institutions.

How the Humboldtian dream got lost

Humboldt advocated three unities, including the unities of knowledge. But the 19^th Century saw two parallel developments that combined together to smother his dream. Firstly, commerce was driven by competition, in particular wherever possible to create monopolies through dominance. So businesses demanded excellence within individual disciplines and were ready to fund research within those disciplines. This was reinforced by nations competing with each other, and similarly funding disciplinary research to support war and infrastructure in particular.

Outside business, improvements in communications meant that the historic basis of professions, the guilds based in individual towns and cities, was steadily replaced by the creation of national professional bodies. By the end of the nineteenth century, both academia and professions had consolidated around discipline-based operations.

While Aristotle could embrace the whole gamut of science, management, arts and humanities, such a polymath would be nearly inconceivable today. Disciplines can and must solve many types of definable problem. But the most important problems in the world clearly cannot be reduced to solution by any single discipline.  Certainly this has been true in the three big crises of 2000, 2007 and 2020, as well as the ongoing difficulties relating to climate change, regional conflict and income distribution.

Far from countering the dysfunctions of discipline-based research and education, universities in general have accentuated the discipline-based approach, not least in ranking individuals and institutions.

De-disciplining

There have been various attempts to counter the negative aspects of fragmentation of disciplines and knowledge, including developing polymathic or boundary-spanning individuals, or creating locales where different disciplines explicitly collaborate.  Ideas of multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches are appropriate for everyday problems, but remain too heavily rooted in the centrality of disciplines to address wicked problems.

Nicolescu has long advocated a more radical approach called transdiscipinarity: “that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline.”

Nicolescu promoted the concept of indisciplinarity, building on its evolution in Art History as characterised by Thomas Mitchell who argues “indiscipline is a moment of breakage or rupture, when the continuity is broken and the practice comes into question.” 

When it comes to addressing wicked problems, de-disciplining becomes essential, but over nearly two centuries both disciplines and their related professions have proved remarkably resistant even to modest multi-disciplinary initiatives, so those who advocate transdisciplinary and indisciplinary approaches face an uphill struggle. However, approaches that deploy arts to underpin transdiscipinarity are illustrated in Chemi and Xiangyun.

Learning for Practical Wisdom

We have created a framework for developing practical wisdom through education that has five dimensions, which we summarise below.

As was mentioned in the UNESCO report, universities focus on dealing with younger people at the beginning of their professional or academic careers. Aside from distance learning universities, there’s a lot less understanding in universities of how to deal with lifelong learning of adults. The mindset in higher education is almost entirely discipline-based. So as discussed above, to move towards indiscipline, is an uphill struggle.

The pedagogies in higher education are often transmissive in nature. Practical wisdom cannot be developed by sitting people in a classroom or online and teaching them in the conventional sense. It has to be some sort of active conversational learning, not least involving simulations of diverse types. Traditional university teaching is communicating relatively standardised content, while practical wisdom needs to be developed in a much more personalised and reflective approach. Finally, there is a visible hierarchy in most universities between teachers and students. Practical wisdom needs substantial peer-to-peer learning, what Illich called a “web” long before the internet had spread internationally, and nearly two decades ahead of the world wide web.

These five dimensions run against the grain of the modern university, embedded in their operational, everyday assumptions of how to run typical higher-education institutions. The final column assesses whether the COVID-19 crisis has helped. We feel that the shift to fully online learning has introduced many academics to a world of distance learning with which they were wholly unfamiliar. At least some have realised that learning at a distance, the only method that can address the practical wisdom gap for adults en masse, need not be a second-class experience. So there are overall some slight positives in the current situation, but unfortunately they don’t outweigh the resistance that will come from difficulties in unlearning the status quo.

Something can be done: case study

One way of making progress on significant change is through prototyping alternatives, and it is perhaps not surprising that we report here on an EU Erasmus funded project, since EU initiatives tend more explicitly to address UNESCO-type assumptions than do similar UK programmes. The Beyond Text project (2016-2019) formally related to arts-based methods for research, assessment and evaluation, but ultimately turned out to be about creating an indisciplinary community of adult learners, able to test and demonstrate a wide variety of methods for developing and articulating practical wisdom in a democratic fashion. The e-book which summarises the project demonstrates  how art-based methods can challenge more traditional publication methods. The table summarises how far it addresses the practical wisdom learning framework. 

Overall, as Bobadilla et al envisaged, such an arts-based approach “opens up the possibility for asserting counter-discourses that promote alternative frameworks and create possibilities for critical resistance”.

Conclusion

In helping society address its most profound and wicked problems, universities need to augment their traditional delivery of research and education, through an additional focus on developing practical wisdom in adults. In crime dramas, the detective looks for means, motive and opportunity. We believe that that the university sector almost literally is the only sector that has the means to do this. 

The real problem area is motive. Universities are so preoccupied with their success on conventional metrics relating to everyday and familiar discipline-based research and education, that they may be extraordinarily reluctant to commit to indisciplinary activity. Sadly we fear that disciplinary mindset will hinder not just pursuit of solutions to wicked problems, but even the pursuit of democratic societal goals of safety, justice, tolerance and sustainability.

COVID-19 presents a dramatic opportunity, and has certainly helped unfreeze some previously held views on large scale learning for adults, and awareness of appropriate pedagogies for that.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on UnsplashCopy

Tatiana Chemi, PhD is Associate Professor, at the Department of Culture and Learning at Aalborg University, Denmark. At the Chair of Educational Innovation, she works in the field of artistic learning and creative processes.

Clive Holtham is Professor of Information Management at the Business School, City, University of London and a National Teaching Fellow.  He is Director of the Learning Laboratory, whose innovations include the award-winning learning by wandering around (dérive). He co-founded the Centre for Creativity for Professional Practice at City, which led to the unique transdisciplinary Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership. 

Allan Owens is Professor Emeritus of Drama Education, RECAP, University of Chester and a National Teaching Fellow. His current research interests include learning through arts-based research practices and other critically creative pedagogies both within and beyond the academy.

Anne Pässilä, (PhD) is Visiting Research Fellow at RECAP and Senior Researcher at LUT University, Finland. She specialises in applying arts-based initiatives and arts pedagogy to support innovation and development processes in the public, private and third sectors.

The Higher Education (HE) sector is currently faced with an unprecedented reorganisation of existing pedagogy, with technological platforms playing an increasingly significant role in the adaptation of current and future degree programmes towards a blended approach. As time moves towards the start of the next academic year, uncertainty still prevails amongst internal stakeholders – staff, students and administrators – as well as well as outside stakeholders who are equally unsure of what the future might hold. There is a perceived reliance on technology as a saviour in these times, yet this blog posits that the outcomes of teaching and learning should be discussed more widely embracing the views from all stakeholders and participants, especially the student body before dictating the mode of delivery and this is particularly pertinent in the post pandemic university.  

This discussion is about the pedagogical conversations that are required to transition the university from a pre to a post-pandemic state whilst not losing sight of the Vygotskian ideals which were in existence long before any technological influences. The concepts around Vygotsky’s ideas highlight the importance of culture, environment and social relationships within a purposeful learning environment, engaging with ‘more knowledgeable others’.  In this context, as universities move forward, three key challenges emerge for institutions shifting towards a blended learning approach building upon robust and established pedagogies whilst not losing sight of social learning and organisational knowledge that could be enhanced by technology, not steered by it. 

The first of the three challenges is to evaluate and identify the multiplicity of varying formats in order to adopt those best suited for teaching and learning and discounting disruptive technologies. This requires a recognition and understanding of how the non-disruptive technologies could enhance teaching and learning and navigate the university from a pre to post pandemic state. Many universities are already adapting new approaches to technology enabled learning (TEL) but the chaos and turbulence of COVID-19 has accelerated the pace and rate of change required for future sustainability. 

This  leads on to the second key challenge of developing the skills and competences of the existing academic staff and student body who are now required to serve a predominantly digital world of learning whilst acknowledging the impact of these transitions  already emerging in the workplace. There is some evidence of a skills gap amongst academics – those who are technology enabled and eager to try out new approaches in contrast with ‘late adopters’ who are less keen and need more scaffolding.  Institutional solutions are already appearing in the form of online staff development in the form of technology training using virtual learning platforms, but the success measures as to the suitability of this approach are not in evidence. This is largely due to the emergency need to adapt non-technology dependent programmes for a blended delivery, effective immediately for a generation of students whose learning experiences are embedded in face-to-face, classroom based delivery. 

This then presents the third key challenge which is to establish the best way to reconfigure existing degree programmes, associated learning materials and activities for a blended delivery, which is not an easy option for institutions that are largely founded on synchronous delivery of teaching and learning programmes, building relationships and establishing networks for future-proofing graduate employability. This agenda is further complicated by the subtext of maintaining university ranking, determined by current educational metrics underpinning the NSS, TEF and DLHE.

Whilst responding to these transitions it is imperative to continue to acknowledge the importance of process and structure to maintain a secure environment for both staff and students, acknowledging the voices of the teaching and student unions who are constantly expressing their concerns for staff and student welfare as well as the quality of the educational experience. This response should provide both a strategic and an operational steer for futureproofing teaching and learning within HE.  This should be built upon established pedagogy, utilise appropriate technologies to ensure continued reputation and credibility as an educational process within the Higher Education sector meeting the needs of future employers and students alike.

This could then result in a continued worthwhile experience for students that embraces the Vygotskian ideals of culture and organisation, ensuring that the learning environment, whether it is a physical one or a virtual one will not to diminish the student journey. Underpinned by research based on staff and student experiences, this blog presents a solution of a staff development, training framework supporting the national and international HE professional body in the development and transition from traditional pedagogies towards a TEL inclusive blended learning approach.   

The rationale for the Technology Enabled Learning Training Framework (TELTF) presented below, builds on established pedagogical theory, incorporating practice based research and evaluation, demonstrating its contribution in providing a solution to the current context and guidance moving forward.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Dr Jackie Adamson is a Senior Lecturer and Trans National Education (TNE) Director in the Department of Leadership and Human Resources Department where she teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Her research and development areas are educational psychology and pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on eLearning and ePortfolios.  She contributes to the innovative degree apprenticeships programmes within Northumbria University and has extensive experience of overseas collaborations with partner institutions.  

Diane Sloan is Professor of Learning and Teaching in the Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Strategy Subject Group where she teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.  Her research interests include approaches to delivering study and language skills, the use of technology to support learning, student attendance and; and is currently working on supporting academic researcher development and transnational education.

University structures, processes and practices are typically characterised as glacial in their pace of change. Yet Covid19 has radically changed all this. In many parts of the world badly affected by the ongoing challenges and effects of the global pandemic, the socio-temporal dynamics of life within the academy have been profoundly ruptured. Within days university buildings closed, dorms closed, the streets emptied, we recalibrated social space, and generated a new lexicon to describe this new state of affairs.  Lock-down, social distancing, shielding, and life in the 2-metre society, were the immediate measures and reactions to the spread of a virus that has caused whole industries to grind to a halt.  The future now appeared, not as a space of relative certainty, but one where our taken-for-granted temporal horizons no longer hold.

Yet, how can we be certain about the future, when by definition the future cannot be known?  This is not to say we don’t try and anticipate the future. We do, and over the course of the past six months of lockdown, we’ve seen an array of anticipatory practices on show in the university. Universities have reasserted their visions of a commitment to excellence, there has been intensive scenario-planning around likely futures, whilst risk assessments have been deployed to pre-empt the effects of a particular future arriving.

But anticipatory practices are not innocent. They are political. And if the future in modern societies is now understood as open, it is also open to colonisation. As argues Adams: “From a pre-destined realm of unique individuals and groups, the future was transmuted into an abstract, empty and quantifiable entity available for free unrestricted use and exploitation” (2010: 365).  Yet oddly enough, social theorists have paid less attention to the social and political nature of time future, aside from assumptions that time past and time present might somehow shape what might now follow. 

Over the past two decades there has been growing engagement with ‘time’ by social and political theorists as a corrective to the spatial turn and as a means of widening our temporal lens to take account of the past, present and the future. This mean that rather than recognize time “as a side element to social life” (Atkinson, 2019: 951), we need to ask about the nature of the epistemic gains when we weave time into our explanatory accounts of human beings, the socio-temporal relations between them, and relationships between time and social power. This includes thinking through the ways in which spheres of social life, including higher education and the pandemic academy, are shaped by a particular set of temporal dynamics, practices and logics.

These temporal dynamics are increasingly shaped by the inclusion of higher education in the further development of global education markets, global competition and the development of knowledge economies, the threat of security and terrorism, the rise of populist politics, and austerity (Robertson, 2020), and now the global pandemic. Covid19, and its rapid spread around the globe is a product of precisely these politics; dense cities and highly mobile populations. Time, space and sociality are woven together giving shape to complex processes and practices: 

…our hopes, plans and fears take us into the future, and we move into this domain with great agility: we make choices. We weigh up risks and chances. We calculate the likelihood of success. Thus, futures are created continuously across the world, every second of the day. They are produced by the full range of social institutions: politics, law and the economy, science, medicine and technology, education and religion (Adam, 2008: 5).

However, studying the future and its power to shape the present is not simple, not least because the future, by definition, has not yet arrived. Adam and Groves (2007) argue there are three forms of knowledge about the future: (i) as an extension of the present – a characteristic of traditional societies; (ii) as a continuation of the past – to be understood through scientific techniques such as correlation and calculation, and (iii) as a means of mapping possible, probable or preferred, futures in a non-deterministic way. The latter two are broadly shaped by theories of modernity, where the future is empty, open and unpredictable, and needs to be tamed.

Sociologists Tavory and Eliasoph (2013) have also set out a theory of anticipation to study how futures are coordinated and identify three different modes: (i) protentions which are the moment by moment anticipations; (ii) actors’ trajectories through time, which proceed in more or less predictable ways, and (iii) plans and temporal landscapes which are the overarching temporal orientations which guide actions, such as large planning endeavours, sequencing, a calendar of events, and so on.

If protentions are the necessary anticipations learned in the process of socialisation to enable social actors to engage with each other (e.g. turn taking in conversations; what side of the footpath we should walk on), an actor’s trajectory through time will also be the product of expectations (about who we should be/come). Trajectories are shaped by assumptions within culture and identity projects at the level of family, community and nation. Who should go to university, and where? And, for the moment, do I go this year, or wait until the whole global pandemic blows over. These assumptions both re/produce social selves, groups, and societies, including their different statuses, and access to resources. They are also constitutive of identities – the learner, the student, the graduate, the teacher, and so on. Plans and temporal landscapes are the means which guide actions, and the object of governing.  A range of anticipatory strategies and devices guide actions through ‘the way things happen’, in an institution like a university. Calendars guide a sequence of classes, meetings, or an academic year. Large ideational projects, such as modernization, come with assumptions about the future and how it will come about. At the level of individual or social groups, developing or improving oneself especially through learning means being modern. 

Yet all of these temporal horizons – the moment to moment, actor’s trajectories and large temporal landscapes have not only been ruptured, fractured and collapsed, but there is a cloud of uncertainty constantly present. 

Several things are particularly striking regarding anticipation in the contemporary academy. Our probabilistic calculations using risk analysis tools can be shown to be false friends. After all, whose risk registers had Covid on it?  There is now a dance between delivering certainty in a context of greater threats as the various institutions – home, schools, universities, services – become increasingly inter-dependent, which in turn heighten the threats arising from disturbances elsewhere. Any amount of mitigation of risk as a pre-emptive measure offers the risk-holder a false sense of certainty about the future.

The second, is that the future for the academy has been colonised by a neoliberal imagination that is materialised in artifacts, is embodied in expectations about the future (graduate premium) and in anticipatory governing practices that appear neutral and objective, but which are profoundly political. Living in a state or preparedness for what might go wrong (affect), especially in conditions of precarity, generates its own pathologies and effects. The third is the scientisation of the future as an area of academic expertise. Over the past thirty years, economic modellers, futurists, risk managers and entrepreneurs now claim specialist expertise about the future, and what is to be done. The question to be asked here is how do they legitimate themselves in the face of futures that fail to materialise, or when our expectations of futures promised are unequally shared?

Photo by Alex Perez on Unsplash

While I attempt to organise some preliminary thoughts about the emerging Post-Pandemic University I am confronted with the not unexpected difficulty of the task. In fact, I am tempted to begin by asserting– with a hint of provocation –  that perhaps we should let our emotions loose and accept that our thinking and praxis  be guided by them.      

Since March, an unprecedented re-orientation of the universities’ mode of delivery toward online provision in teaching and research has taken place in response to the global Covid-19 emergency. This has determined the most rapid and profound alteration in the everyday educational practices and routines ever witnessed in the history of the (HE) sector, the shock waves of which can arguably still be felt by staff and students at an emotional and psychological level.

However, we, the University, have raised to the challenge not only in compliance with the capitalist imperative to guarantee ‘business as usual’ and student satisfaction, but also and in primis out of genuine care for the educational needs of the students and in a spirit of mutual solidarity in the face of a historical moment of radical uncertainty and existential precarity.

From an anthropological point of view, and as a researcher interested in the subtle interplay between repetition and difference that traverses the embodied institution, I have considered and experienced the shift to online provision as a test to our intrinsic capacity to adapt.  Lee calls this a process of “rhythmic recuperation”: once the unfamiliar becomes gradually normalised,  we will  adapt even to the unthinkable, turning intentions “against the initial design”, as Lefebvre observes in his Critique of Everyday Life. However,  adaptation might well be the key to survival, but this says nothing about its conditions.

To complicate things further, we approach the new academic year with the possibility of new, restrictive measures looming large and this seems to be consecrating hybridity, liminality and uncertainty as the (un-)defining features of the Post-Pandemic University.

I argue that this liminal, uncertain and hybrid environment is mirrored in the polarity of sentiment toward the gradual abandonment of what – for some – already feels like the old, off-line, University. In other words, I want to draw attention to the tensions, contradictions and opportunities arising from the newly configured hyper-connected yet disembodied institution.

In order to do so, I take the cue from Bifo Berardi’s prescient Breathing. Chaos and Poetry. Here, hyper-connectivity and diminishing degrees of corporeal “conjunction” are indicted as the problematic outcomes of modern pan-logical projects.  Rationality has bred chaos and human life is increasingly subsumed to malign forms of abstractions. Berardi exhorts us to disavow the “century of measure” (p.22) to find a novel, rhythmic recalibration with the cosmos and invites us to conspire, to literally and metaphorically go out and “breathe together” (ibid.).

This finds notable correspondence with  Lefebvre’s writings on space conceived as always and already socially produced  by a rhythmic constellation  (indeed “conspiration”) of bodies, whose co-production of space is defined not only in relation to a variety of social/institutional needs but also, crucially,  to a sheer human desire for enjoyment.

Within this intellectual perimeter, I ask what is gained (or lost) educationally, existentially and intellectually when “the continuum of conjunctive experience is disrupted by the fractal simultaneity of connectivity” (Berardi,  p. 98) and what modes of appropriation and enjoyment are rendered available through virtual spaces.      

In my capacity as a doctoral supervisor, for instance, I have encountered a variety of responses to the new virtual environment. Some students have embraced it as an effective and even enjoyable substitute, at times increasing their demands for quick and informal chats, thus paralleling the good old impromptu visits to the office.   Others, however, have found it daunting and unpleasant, raising questions about its pedagogical suitability. They lamented in particular the socially uncomfortable staring-effect induced by a medium that forces the participants to keep demanding and prolonged levels of attention directed to the speaking person. Conversely, others have complained about what they perceive to be a lack of true connection, caused by a difficulty in looking at interlocutors straight in the eyes.

With time, both technology enthusiasts and sceptics have disclosed what what Kelly has termed a “critical nostalgia” for the abandoned campus and their own offices,  mourning the loss of humanity that gives meaning to places and often recalling the emotional and sensory experiences that punctuated their everyday life.         

In a similar vein, colleagues have both recognized the opportunities offered by online teaching and research, appreciating, for instance, the significantly widened possibilities to take part in webinars and online conferences worldwide.

This, however, has come at a price.  The amount of time spent learning how to navigate new digital platforms such as MS Teams or Zoom added an extra burden to already unbearable workloads, not to mention the unequal impact on work/life balance inevitably suffered by female academics. All this has had an adverse impact on the already compromised mental health and wellbeing of staff.

Albeit limited, this anecdotal evidence points to (Zoom) fatigue, exhaustion and suffering as the underlying conditions currently afflicting staff and students. These feelings, now more than ever part of their psychic ambience, inform their ambivalent responses to a rapidly changing institutional and existential landscape.

If suppressed, they will inhibit our ability to construe the Post-Pandemic, hybrid University as a field of possibility and experimentation that will allow us to break free from “the century of measure”.  

In order to do so, adaptation must entail a re-action to inhuman conditions of work, and a re-appropriation of the enjoyable time-spaces of teaching and learning, be them on-line or off-line.   It is unrealistic and unfair to expect that staff and students will get their sea legs in absence of basic mechanisms that safeguard and promote their wellbeing as a pre-condition for a pledge to permanent adaptation.

In a bid to develop better, and more inclusive ways of caring, the Post-Pandemic University should start by acknowledging “mutuality and voice” as Richard Hall reminds us, for they “point beyond hopelessness”. 

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Fadia Dakka is Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of CSPACE (Centre for the Study of Culture in Practice in Education) at Birmingham City University, UK.  Her current research interests include rhythmanalysis, philosophy and theory of higher education, and universities futures.

Under the exceptional regime of governmental steps taken towards the management of COVID-19, much of the social and economic life has gone online in India, as elsewhere in the world. Digital interfaces have supplanted real-life interactions and enabled a sense of continuity of experience albeit constrained by the screen. Digital platforms as both enabling and constraining technologies rings true in the Indian education experience under the lockdown when teaching and learning went online. The framing of this migration from an evacuated institutional space of the school or college to a digital platform, or online education, overlooks the social situatedness of digital technologies.

In this brief rumination, we present an Indian perspective on teaching and learning online during the pandemic lockdown when the digital became the near-exclusive medium of social interaction. Our ongoing qualitative study aims to examine how the pandemic reconfigured the experience of teaching and learning through video conferencing digital platforms on mobile devices and laptops. Based on preliminary observations, we demonstrate how the transition of higher education from an institutional space to online learning entails the reconfiguration of a familiar space to which everyone retreated to, during the pandemic – the home. The Indian middle-class home has historically been a shared space structured by power relations affording little privacy to its residents. Ethnographic and historical sketches of the Indian middle-class have addressed the transition from a pre-liberalization to life under economic liberalization – especially the IT boom –  that shaped a consumerist ethos with a desire for greater privacy from parental involvement. In the 21st century, the mobile phone penetration and cheap Internet data access have brought about a digital revolution producing newer media and cultural practices that are entangled with information technology infrastructures such as cellphone towers.

The affordances of the digital revolution have transformed social and economic life in India. Within the broader discourse on informational or data privacy, however, these affordances have been subject to a blurring of boundaries between the public and the private. A critical consideration of privacy in a globalized postcolonial India must heed its conceptual intersectionality. For instance, teaching online during the pandemic has been fraught with digital platform specific privacy and security concerns such as in the case of Zoom, a video conferencing app. The concerns in India pertained to data theft, hacking of laptops and other security lapses. The privacy concerns do not just end at security, hacking and data breaches. In the Indian households with a joint family structure, professors who participated in our study had to deal with people walking in and out of the workspace, cooking noises from the kitchen and activities of domestic help who typically clean homes late morning. These distractions illuminate the home as a contested space splitting between leisure and livelihood, professional work and domestic labour and attention and affect. Privacy in this contested space is afforded intermittently and needs to be implicitly prioritized. Should the teacher worry about data security and breach issues that digital platforms pose? Or should they secure a sense of spatial privacy primarily to ensure a semblance of seamlessness in imparting education via the screen? The negotiation of these considerations in the contested space of the Indian household suggests how privacy is never absolute and often remains a function of attempts to ensure it spatially and temporally. An important question for potential research may concern how privacy may be prioritized in the digital mediation of a social space in the Indian context where traditional cultures of social involvement in others’ lives meets prolific practices of everyday online data consumption in spaces of leisure.

Privacy, or the affordance of being left alone in its most fundamental sense, is only part of the lived experience of online teaching at home. Between attention to the screen and distraction from the surrounding space, professors’ initial response was one of stress. In time, as they became used to the online mode, other issues came up. New video conferencing technologies, familiar to some, frustrated others as they struggled with the interface with various options to mute, turn camera on or look at the chat sidebar. Most felt that online teaching was no match for the physical, institutional space where face-to-face interactions made it easier to connect with students and follow visual cues for a more grounded learning experience. Eye-contact with students enriches teaching in a physical space. Without such visual communication, the texture of lecture delivery is bereft of its impact, engagement and humour. The desire for visual exchange in physical space for a reassurance of lesson understanding also functions as the need for disciplinary surveillance where a quick glance across the room may restore order. The mobile or laptop screen as the interface between the enthusiastic teacher and errant student constricts a proper view of the other side. This facilitation emerges to be less a staging of knowledge exchange and more an unpredictable encounter with chance affordances. To switch on the camera for the professor is to expose oneself, a self-conscious feeling induced by the awareness that students are watching their teacher in her private space. An access to this view can create a sense of vulnerability for the teacher upon whom the student gaze rests. To be viewed on camera, and viewed as a professional, the teacher must be presentable, dress up and look nice. But she is unable to look back at her students unless they turn their camera on, as a rule. But rules in online teaching are tempting to break and they are perhaps broken without much accountability. Logics of presence and absence so conspicuous in the physical classroom become tropes of a hide-and-seek online; a turned off camera guarantees presence not. The professor’s voice travels through the digital medium to the other side where students may or may not listen. Speech in the digital medium is not always comforted by attention.

When considered in the context of the attention economy in which social media strategies seek “eyeballs” to maximize economic value in a media-saturated, information rich world, attention on both sides – teaching and learning – demands an affective bodily labour. Contrast here the teacher’s body in the physical classroom orientated towards the students, able to move, inhabiting a familiar space as Sara Ahmed would put it, with the teacher’s body in her familiar space of the home facing a laptop screen yet feeling disorientated. In a physical classroom, she enjoys a certain mobility, the ability to turn to the board, walk around and inhabit corners to make a point. Teaching online from home raises the question of digital phenomenology, or how online modes of attention-intensive activity such as teaching at home orientate the teacher’s body in her familiar space that suddenly feels disorienting. On the contrary, students in a physical classroom usually orientated towards the teacher and the blackboard are liberated from the imperative of constant presence online as long as they are logged in and not visible on camera.

Finally, the technological infrastructure including laptops, mobile phones and network connectivity determines the overall experience of online education for both the teacher and student. India is often understood to be leading the statistics for the number of people getting online and mobile phone service penetration, however, a more pertinent question is that of privileged haves and underprivileged haves whose experience of the Internet is shaped by their geographical location, a broad marker of socioeconomic status.

As India gradually resumes social, economic and public activity despite the rising number of COVID-19 cases, the future of education in a post-COVID context ought to be addressed as we prepare to return to a new reality of social distancing and masked witnessing. Online teaching is likely to remain a viable option in the post-pandemic university from an institutional perspective. Professors participants addressed this question in practical terms, some feeling that they need to be prepared while others maintaining that online teaching could not be sustained in the long run, even if it saved them time taken up by a long commute, the fatigue of traffic on Indian roads and regular exposure to sound and air pollution.

Yet, a desire for return to the physical, institutional space of teaching, learning, socializing and mentoring, however ideal, would remain captive to a cruel optimism as Lauren Berlant observes – a desire for something that may be a hindrance to one’s flourishing, at least in the short run.

Photo by Rubén Rodriguez on Unsplash

Pawan Singh holds a doctorate in media studies from the University of California San Diego. His work addresses the discourse on privacy and identity within a transnational context with a primary focus on postcolonial cultures. From 2016-2019, he was a New Generation Network Scholar at Deakin University and the Australia India Institute in Melbourne, Australia. 

Shanu Shukla is currently an Academic Associate in the Indian Institute of Management Indore, India. She did her PhD in Psychology from the Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India. She was also a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.

Deepak Padhi is an Interaction Designer and researcher with a specialization in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) from IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay. His special interests are in user research, design for inclusive societies, design for education, multi-modal interface design and heuristic evaluation.

Devanuj Balakrishan is a Design practitioner, educator & researcher from India. He holds a PhD in Interaction Design. His research interests are primarily oriented towards Emergent Users (Next Billion Users). Using Design Research, he advises start-ups. He is active in the HCI community & has also worked in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Pranjal Jain is a Co-founder and Operations Lead at theUXWhale, New Delhi, India, a design collective which comprises multi-domain experts who aim to provide primacy to the lived human experience in the design practice. His interests lie in designing for ethical data practices, online privacy through speculative and critical design. He has his Master’s in human-Centered Design from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. He has worked with Future of Finance Initiative – Dvara Research, Digital Identity Research Initiative – Indian School of Business and Idea Cellular Ltd. He is also the founding chair and the exchairperson at the Srishti SIGCHI Chapter and IEEE NPSS VIT. He has been an Associate Chair for Late Breaking Work in CHI 2019, Co-Organizer of BestofCHI2019 and a Paper Reviewer for IndiaHCI2019.

One of the first books in my infant’s growing collection was Anti-racist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi introduces nine ways that children can grow up to make “equity a reality”. Two of these stood out to me: 

1. Use your words to talk about race. No one will see racism if we only stay silent. If we don’t name racism, it won’t stop being so violent. 
2. Point at policies as the problem, not people. Some people get more, while others get less…because policies don’t always grant equal access. 

In this children’s book, Kendi reminds us of the simple facts about racism that we often (choose to) forget, that racism is not about individuals but rather embedded in systems and institutions. Too often, concepts like meritocracy obfuscate institutional racism. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequities to the point where they should be obvious to all. The priorities of the post-pandemic university must include an examination of how uncritically embracing meritocracy upholds and erases institutional racism, followed by concrete actions to make equity a reality.  

It has been said that we are currently facing two pandemics: COVID-19 and systemic racism. Systemic racism can explain why more Black people are dying in the pandemic, why fewer Black people go to university, and why more Black people live in poverty. The post (racial) pandemic university is one that works to dismantle structures and policies that have perpetrated social, political and economic violence. 

If we can see racism for what it is, a scar on society that damages us all, and if we can act to tackle it in all its forms, then the light that covid has shone on racism will guide us to a better place.

Fiona Godlee, editor in chief, the BMJ

Racism is a word which is often associated with overt malevolence, and it has become distorted over time. Refusing to label something racist unless it is overtly evil almost to the point of caricature conveniently shuts down conversation about wider patterns in our society, and topics that need to be discussed often go unheard: No one will see racism if we only stay silent…

In a similar vein, the great inertia of meritocracy has become an excuse to un-see colour, thereby denying the lived experiences of marginalised people and creating mechanisms for self-blame when some fail to succeed. Such thinking collapses existing social hierarchies, disparities and inequalities, and reduces individuals to units of merit. Meritocratic thinking, when enacted in a way that undermines systemic racism, is a form of violence: if we don’t name racism, it won’t stop being so violent.

Across the pond, racism serves as a barrier to African Americans’ achievement. Even if unintended, the promise of equality inherent in meritocratic ideology serves to elide racism. The diagram (from the same paper) outlines mechanisms by which meritocratic thinking creates barriers to opportunity, leading to poor health outcomes for Black Americans. 

Meritocratic thinking creates a narrative wherein individual drive and effort become primarily or exclusively the cause of someone’s success. Meritocratic thinking protects harmful policies that create a tapestry of folktales about why Black youth don’t apply to, or don’t succeed in higher education. Meritocracy untempered by an awareness of current and historical inequity ignores the fact that not only is the playing field uneven, but some people don’t even get to play on the same field as everyone else.

Post-pandemic universities must examine how meritocratic thinking informs every facet of their operation. Take algorithms, for example, which influence admissions decisions and research funding while purporting to bring an objectivity to these processes and therefore eliminate the possibility of discrimination. Evidence says otherwise, and universities must confront the reality that meritocracy, even when based in an algorithm, is not the same as objectivity.

Similarly, universities must not conflate diversity with equity. There is a danger of diversity policies becoming an exercise in performative allyship which skirts around meaningful action. Diversity is a necessary but not sufficient condition to our practice of equity. Simply increasing diversity on campus, whether it is within the student body or faculty, once again falls back on the idea that racism and discrimination are individualized phenomena rather than systemic barriers. Diversity initiatives are vital but will only truly succeed in an environment that is already moving towards equity. 

While COVID-19 might seem to accelerate social activism and catalyse change, it is important to remind ourselves that these wheels have been tirelessly turning for a long time. Rebecca Solnit uses metaphors of bonfires and waterfalls to depict the slow road to sudden change:

But none of these would have signified if the smallest thing hadn’t happened millions of times over: people changed their minds. Or in the case of the young, grew up with minds shaped by something better than the obliviousness and indifference that passed as not being racist in my own youth.

Rebecca Solnit, On the Decades of Activism that Leads to Historic Change

We cannot authentically engage with conversations about the post-pandemic university without understanding racism as a central problem in our institutions, and we must acknowledge that meritocracy upholds racism while simultaneously allowing us to claim everyone has an equal chance. Universities must disrupt the patterns currently in place and invest in a sustained and rigorous quest to improve access to education and create initiatives that are not just “not racist” but indeed are explicitly anti-racist. This involves listening: at a practical level, policy that is invested in reparative futures in education must give space to the experiences and knowledges of people whose histories have been silenced by or made marginal in educational systems and processes. This slow work is the fuel that will feed the fire. 

Universities serve an important role in shaping the future of thought and theory. As institutions gear towards a post-pandemic future, unpacking the failure of meritocracy must be a central priority. By claiming to be meritocratic systems, university policies maintain inequality: policies don’t always grant equal access. Perhaps we can take a page out of our children’s books to make equity a reality in the post-pandemic university.  

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Arushi Manners is a doctoral researcher in Learning Sciences at the University of Calgary. She also works in the field of educational development at a post-secondary institution in Toronto. 

One of the more insidious and less tangible – but nonetheless known – ways in which structural racism operates is through the construction and maintenance of gaps, erasures, silences, forgetting and unknowing. These epistemic smokescreens of supremacy have the maddening capacity to obfuscate the boundaries between knowledge and ignorance. Bailey (in Sullivan and Tuana’s vital volume on racial ignorance) articulates powerfully what many people of colour are aware of: “…ignorance is often an active social production… From positions of dominance, ignorance can take the form of those in the centre either refusing to allow those at the margins to know, or of actively erasing indigenous knowledges. More subtle examples of socially constructed ignorance include epistemic blank spots that make privileged knowers oblivious to systemic injustices.”

The making and design of these systemic blank spots i.e. the substantive knowledge-based practices of racial ignorance in academia has disturbed me since 2017, following the instructive mistake I made of starting a race-based network. Where Mills observed that “Often for their very survival, blacks have been forced to become lay anthropologists, studying… the ‘white tribe’ that has such frightening power over them”, I found myself as much as in the position of an early career brown woman as an ethnographer trying to decipher the value-system and language of almost exclusively white managers. This is how I started hearing the word ‘complex’ and variants thereof repeatedly in meetings with senior management, faculty and various equality and diversity committees. I have heard this refrain ever since, most recently in the many emails articulating the institution’s pandemic plans.

I wanted to know what ‘complex’ means in conversations about racial inequalities in the institution. While the race wage gap is my entry-point here to the vocabulary and heavy conceptual lifting that comes with ‘complexity’ and associated concepts, it is not as immediately critical as redundancies, precariousness and direct discrimination in UK universities, all of which also disproportionately affect women of colour and have similarly been couched as complex. My broader concern is with why ‘complexity’ emerges when whiteness is asked to reflect on its practices and effects.

How is it that – some 50 years after the Race Relations Act and almost 20 since amendments; hundreds of powerful narratives, research papers, survey after document after survey, tomes of critical theory, and hundreds of racial justice initiatives and sensible roadmaps to narrowing inequalities – these apparently very smart white men and women were still telling me that race inequalities persisting under their watch is a ‘complex’ matter? If things are indeed ‘complicated’ and ‘difficult’, is it not possible to still act on the knowns? How does one go about understanding – to move forward from or past – this apparent racial ignorance from above?

Three possible, mutually dependent explanations:

1. Academic hazard: ‘Complexity’ is over-used in academia, and sociologists are particularly guilty. To paraphrase Bain, when sociologists are criticised for failure to capture social phenomenon, one of their commonest excuses is that their subjects are the most unpredictable and data most complex. We are thus at least somewhat responsible for constructing an epistemic template for understanding social phenomenon that is filtered through a lens of iterative, intellectualised and interminable complexity. When little attempt is made to simplify and apply without negating nuance or closing off possibilities for further study, ‘complexity’ becomes a cover for unknowing, and indefinite questioning replaces doing e.g. ‘black student attainment gaps are a complex issue, let’s conduct another study to find out why’.
   
   
2. Situated (un)knowing: Drawing on Alcoff, when a member of a group claims something is complex, this may be due to limitations emerging from their social location, related to that group identity. Ignorance here is situated unknowing, e.g. ‘how can I as a white person understand or empathise with the non-white experience when very little in the sum of my lived experience allows for or indeed requires this knowledge? As many feminist and black scholars have observed, for members of dominant groups, imagining the world from the perspective of the Other is often taken as cognitive burden and epistemic excess. Whiteness in this case recognises or displays a lack in itself that renders it unable or unwilling to engage with the effects of racial injustice.
   
   
3. Strategic ignorance: A more structural explanation comes from Mills’ widely-cited observations on the ‘inverted epistemology of racial ignorance’. Whiteness, as Alcoff writes, has a vested interest in “seeing the world wrongly”, to choose which parts of the world it wants to see and which to be oblivious to. McGoey posits that such ‘strategic ignorance’ maintains institutional power by avoiding liability and by pre-determining future responses. The language of complexity I encountered focussed on the unknowns e.g. ‘the reasons are multi-factorial and complex therefore finding solutions is a complicated process’. Frequently, little comment is made on the many knowns, particularly on actions long articulated, advocated for and already undertaken (with little support) by academics of colour. Part of this tendency toward blank spots may also be characterised as ‘sea-lioning’. Responsibility for knowing is devolved either to diversity offices and committees with little power to effect change or to already overburdened staff. Ineffective measures that do not require expense or systemic overhaul (e.g. unconscious bias training; mentoring and leadership schemes) persist and are illustrative of deliberate intransigence (e.g. ‘everyone has biases’, rather than ‘there is an issue with systemic racism). These add up to offer plausible deniability to those in power, delay known corrective action indefinitely, and to protect institutions from costs needed to actually achieve social justice.

Early April 2020, a long email from the university’s executive board, summarised and paraphrased: ‘These are challenging, unprecedented, difficult times, and we are all anxious and affected. We are postponing fixed term staff redundancies. Redundancy notices were sent out as due process. We must maximise student income next year to avoid more painful future action. The past few weeks have shown how much we can achieve when we work together’. Mid-May 2020, the third email in as many days: ‘Our finances are strong. But students, especially international students, may not come. This situation was unforeseen, the future is uncertain. We are promoting in-status only for academic staff and cancelling professional staff promotions. To protect everyone’s future, we have had to make difficult decisions. If you have questions, refer to the FAQ.’ Five weeks ago, a collective we, now we the board. The messages crafted around goodwill and togetherness are now replaced by the bare truth: ‘we may all be in the same storm, but we are all definitely not in the same boat’.

Few of my questions were answered by the FAQ, but in early June, an email on Black Lives Matter, paraphrased: ‘Apologies if some might feel this is belated. We take pride that social justice is central to our mission, vision and strategy. These and the honorary degrees we give out are not tokenistic. A Race Equality Charter update was presented earlier this week. We now have an action plan based on surveys, projects and workshops we have done in the past two years. We have decided to diversify student recruitment, address the attainment gap, decolonise, and look at recruitment and progression support. Email with thoughts, we will listen and do better’.

I send an email saying what I think of the board’s decision to freeze progression processes. The decision was 1. unsupported by concrete financial evidence, 2. autocratic given staff were not consulted and few fairer alternatives considered, 3. contradictory to BLM messaging since cuts would most affect women, academics of colour and fixed-term contract staff. My response comes from senior management: The decisions they are making are ‘difficult’ given ‘unforeseen’ and ‘unprecedented’ circumstances. They do not dispute the negative impact on gender and race parity, but ‘hope to continue their work on this front when possible’. They underline that no one else has complained about their decisions and take pains to point out that my tone is ‘unkind’.

The race inequalities that existed and persisted pre-pandemic are now being exacerbated by pre-emptive and under-evidenced cost-cutting policies affecting the most precarious of university labour. When called to consider and account for detrimental equality impacts of specific policies – plainly incompatible with the spirit and substance of florid BLM statements – senior management’s recourse is to ‘complexity’ (once again), (now the) ‘uncertainty’ of the situation, and general silence as consent. Complexity, now compounded by people in power ‘exploiting unknowns in the wider environment’, is being used to legitimise autocratic austerity measures, to defend indefinite delays to justice, and to deflect from commitment to systemic changes beyond BLM statements.

The main problem is and has always been known: structural racism. Many of the primary solutions have been apparent for decades to anyone who has been reading and listening: hire more black and ethnic minority staff on secure contracts; recruit, support and provide funding for black students; take a zero-tolerance approach to racism, micro-aggression and the hostile environment on campus; close the wage gap; and for the love of all that is good, no more surveys, committees and performative allyship.

It’s really not that complex.

Photo by Jaroslav Devia on Unsplash

Audrey Verma is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow studying environmental participation and citizenship in the digital anthropocene. Her previous postdoc was an ethnography of university-business collaborations. She learned a great deal from starting a race-based network in an academic institution. It was an experience she would rather not repeat.

Small stories of pandemic fatigue

1

You’re in the middle of a work meeting and your child pops in, visible on your screen for all to see. There is just a moment to decide whether you will panic or remain calm, to wonder how the people on the other side will react. Will they be welcoming or impatient; will your child be demanding or understanding this time? Are you in the middle of making a complex point where you need to concentrate, or are you less central and can turn off your camera and hide your home life from view? Even if those you care for do not appear on your screen, they are part of the hidden work that you are doing now: juggling attention, judging need. As pandemic disruption extends, you are all tiring of the novelty of worlds colliding, over and over again.

2

The professional day starts earlier and earlier. You’re reading emails in bed as soon as you wake up. As soon as you’re at your desk you are in back to back committee meetings where emphasis is placed on student wellbeing and student success. Next you join a planning meeting with your research team, and then wrap up with a department meeting. Finally you switch Zoom rooms to begin a three hour graduate seminar evening class. After a day of sitting in the same seat for the duration of a long haul flight, moving from meeting to meeting with no more than a click, you are now working to conceal your exhaustion on screen. You strain to signal your presence, your sincere care, and your attention. As another 11-12 hour day winds down, you sense that the ability to maintain positive mental health under such circumstances has become a new performance indicator for career success. 

3

The meeting is peppered by emails that you try to manage while fixing your gaze at the screen, hoping to appear alert. The news is never ending, and never good. You will be teaching online for longer than you thought. You will be supporting less experienced teachers to design their online teaching indefinitely. Vendors are cold-calling you with ideas that show how little they know about students. Your university made the headlines, and not in a good way. International students are never coming back, or perhaps they are. There’s an idea from someone senior who has not recently taught—and has never taught online—that online classes could seat more students than a room, and that by raising caps on class size, money could be saved. Meanwhile, your mental health is important to your employer, although it’s not clear how. Student wellbeing is also a priority, except when scaling up class sizes or using invasive proctoring software or demanding they turn their cameras on. 

In the background of all this noise, your bone-tired colleagues remind each other to mute and unmute, and you find yourself quietly calculating retirement options that map a possible path to the end of working in the pandemic university. It’s tempting.

Holding space for critical labour literacy in the post-pandemic university

If the coronavirus has done one positive thing, it has exposed the labor on which our global economy depends. It is now our job, as scholars and students of data science as it is our job as people in the world, to work to see that labor is properly compensated, valued, and named. – D’Ignazio & Klein (2020)

We aren’t the first to use our own stories to think and talk about the impact of work on health: adjuncts (in the US), casual academics (in Australia), casualised lecturers (in the UK) and labour unions everywhere have raised awareness that the lived experience of precarity is unsustainable. Scholars and activists draw attention to the intersections of technology and career management that depend on self-harming behaviours for systems to function at all. The consequences of unfair and increasingly unsafe working conditions have generated new attention to academic mental health, and especially to suicide, in a sector that hasn’t been traditionally associated with such risk. University workers aren’t frontline or crisis workers, and yet we are in crisis.

The immediate and obvious response from universities has been to implement staff wellbeing initiatives. The scrutiny of individual wellbeing as a solution to a structural problem displaces responsibility for working well onto the worker, and diverts attention from the systematic exploitations that are making working well harder. These are the same structures that also make being well increasingly difficult: the body of the university worker contributes nothing to the work of making universities efficient, profitable or competitive. Accommodation of illness and accessibility requirements is minimally attentive to the law. In reality, academics who are attempting to manage careers while also managing chronic conditions, disability or carer’s responsibilities know that the standards for productivity will be set by those with less to deal with, and that by these standards, they will continue to fail.

Rather than succumbing to the idea that we can solve these structural problems of a competitive workplace by being more effective in managing our health or attitude, we have begun to see an alternative future that can emerge if we speak candidly and with solidarity about the hidden dimensions of work. This means acknowledging the forms of care labour that we recognise in our lives, and noticing how in our own workplace, inequities of labour are entangled with and informed by inequities of living. We think this should also matter to universities at least as much as the current boosterism from the industries waiting to profit from 4IR, because it speaks directly to the graduate futures of all our students, not just the most privileged.

This is not an agenda for competitive graduate employability, but a proposal that being able to read and respond critically to claims about the value and virtue of work can become a priority among university graduate literacies as we participate in post-pandemic economic recovery. Some disciplines have this focus; most do not. The task of developing an agenda for a comprehensive critical labour literacy has begun in activism and research; now we need to address ourselves to this priority across the curriculum. This means centring critical literacy about work in our teaching, while recognising that our own working habits are part of a pedagogy of learning to work that currently models competitiveness, reward scarcity and surge work as liveable moral norms. 

We are ready to make our working lives visible, as a way of refusing the demands of pandemic professionalism that we keep our fatigue veiled and our living responsibilities off screen.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Kate Bowles is a narrative researcher and labour activist, and is currently the Associate Dean International in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She writes online at musicfordeckchairs.com, and is founder of NiCHE: Narrative informed Codesign in Health and Education, a grassroots group of scholars and researchers working on finding effective ways to use storytelling to co-create public systems.

Mia Zamora, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English, the Director of the MA in Writing Studies and the Director of the Kean University Writing Project in Union, NJ, USA. She has recently received the Kean University “Professor of the Year” Award. Dr. Zamora’s commitment to equity, digital literacies, data rights, and intercultural understanding is clear in both her scholarship and leadership work. She has founded several global learning networks including Equity Unbound (#unboundeq) and Networked Narratives (#netnarr), and was Co-Chair of ALT’s #OER20 conference on “Care in Openness”.

Autumm Caines is an Instructional Designer at the University of Michigan – Dearborn in the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources, prior to which she held professional appointments at St. Norbert College and Capital University. She holds a MA in Educational Technology from The Ohio State University. In the Open, she is a Co-Director of Virtually Connecting where her work explores questions of presence and spontaneity in synchronous virtual conversations as well as equity and inclusion in online community. She also helps to organize and facilitate Open/Connected online events for the purposes of faculty development and her own practice in digital stewardship, most recently with the tags #DigCiz, #DigPINS, and #EthicalEdTech. Autumm tweets @autumm and maintains a web portfolio at https://autumm.org

Maha Bali, PhD is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, where she has been a faculty developer since 2003. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the co-director of Virtually Connecting and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound (links below), and is an advisory board member of OneHE and the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange project. She tweets @bali_maha and blogs at https://blog.mahabali.me https://www.virtuallyconnecting.org/ https://unboundeq.creativitycourse.org/.

Paper in press, by Laura Czerniewicz*, Najma Agherdien, Johan Badenhorst, Dina Zoe Belluigi,  Tracey Chambers, Muntuwenkosi Chili, Magriet de Villiers, Alan Felix, Daniela Gachago, Craig Gokhale, Eunice Ivala, Neil Kramm, Matete Madiba, Gitanjali Mistri, Emmanuel Mgqwashu, Nicola Pallitt, Paul Prinsloo, Kelly Solomon,  Sonja Strydom, Mike Swanepoel,  Faiq Waghid, Gerrit Wissing.

By now, concerns about how equity and inequality are playing out in the ‘pivot’ to remote teaching and learning are common in the press and most mainstream political and policy discourses. But early on, questions about the risks to equity and the related responses to such risks within institutions of higher education were being raised. Of these, which concerns for the future post-pandemic persist? 

As teaching and learning professionals and academics from 15 diverse universities in South Africa, we deliberated through collective reflection what we were experiencing, observing, designing and trying to mitigate in Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL). Collecting our reflections and raising critical concerns, we collated these in May 2020 during the first semester of the academic year in South Africa, as the country entered a sudden State of Disaster with severe lockdown restrictions. Nine themes emerged from our reflective narratives that provide insight, from the diverse and unequal positions we found ourselves in, into the current status of responses to Covid-19 with regard to teaching and learning through an equity lens.

We found a useful conceptual lens to articulate the non-linear and contemporaneous forms of inequality which were exposed in the stratified higher education system, in Therborn’s  conceptualisations of ‘vital’, ‘resource’ and ‘existential’ inequality. Highly relevant when the life chances of students are cruelly diminished by the pandemic, vital inequality refers to ‘life chances’, and indeed to survival rates. Under the guise of #FeesMustFall, resource inequalities in recent years have been at the forefront of the sector. During the pandemic, they were reasserted as the unsurprising focus of attention because of immediately evident digital divides. Also relevant is existential inequality,  where the ‘denial of equal recognition and respect [is]… a potent source of humiliations’. 

Nationally and globally, the pandemic has put equity and inequality indisputably on the higher education agenda and it has become evident, as so many have observed, that nothing remains business as usual. In contrast to the predatory entrepreneurial hype of Covid-19 EdTech companies’ innovation speak, we observed the moment as creating possibilities for genuine equity-focused innovation, policymaking, provision and pedagogy. Providing the conditions for policy reformulations, it has also entrenched new practices which foreground flexible and equitable forms of provision. Numerous examples of extraordinary resilience, networks and, at times, unexpected alliances of collaboration and support, have emerged. These include inspiring creativity, and examples of technology used for equity purposes and moments of optimism. 

In the face of terrible loss and the serious risk of educational life chances with concurrent inequalities (vital, resource and existential), there are glimmerings of hope. We have been  heartened by the fundamental concern for the well-being of all who people higher education, and the resilience to continue despite the overwhelming challenges and imperfections of what appears to be ‘the edge of chaos’. Rather than constructing hero narratives of the individuals who exhibited stamina, commitment and sacrifice, we consider the ethics underpinning such social relations while asking questions about sustainability and systemic responsibilities as central to the duty of public care of higher education.

It has become clear to us that the teaching and learning project of the university is relational. Complex problems cannot be effectively solved by one autonomous component. Living Tronto’s  metaphor, we are entangled in a complex web of relations. What we have learnt is that for this to be a caring web of relationship, no one person or group can be solely responsible for decision-making. Across the parties, levels of universities and of society, contributions are required for discussion on caring needs and how they should be met . It is only by taking all stakeholders into consideration that ethical and caring conditions can be created. However, such deliberations and negotiations need time and trust, two resources that have been scarce in these times of crisis and in the terrain of historic and current inequalities in the country. 

Ethical practices come down to everyday decisions of care in caring relationships, offering intersecting, interwoven deliberations that are in some ways are an ethical praxis. What we have seen repeatedly in the recent past, is that if institutional care and support are not in place, educators and learning professionals step in to form relationships and communities of practice to facilitate self-care and care for others ‒ to be both caregivers and care receivers. Within and across the institutions, staff in close collaboration with students and communities, have found and created ways to engage in an ethic of care – listening and responding to the needs of all parties involved. Through these instances and engagements, we have found innovative and creative ways of dealing with the crisis thus far. In contrast to the individualistic profit-motivated notions of care punted as educational remedies, this “is a thing uncountable, incalculable, priceless” 

During this period, fields of practice and scholarship, which previously intersected far less than one would have imagined, have been now thrust together. Historically, questions of access to and success in education were the purview of ‘academic development’, while the digital divide and digital inequalities fell in the parallel realm of ‘educational technology’. The scholarship has drawn on different theoretical sources, and the practice has been supported institutionally in different ways, either centrally or distributed. With ERTL, these separations were eroded, with Student Affairs thrown into the mix as students demand that #NoStudentIsLeftBehind. Further erosion occurred between the boundaries between higher education institutions from the society and structural inequalities in which they are situated. As one of the contributors articulates in this paper, we are teaching from within the community we are living in right now.

What we have learnt is that the nexus of these transformational issues requires new ways of seeing, not unseeing and engaging with what needs to remain visible. This is where the critical hope lies. The pandemic has been an MRI exposing the social bones , an X-ray making it possible “to see all the broken places” . Thus our reflections of ERTL in this paper illuminate multiple and co-existing forms of inequality in higher education. While this might seem hopeless at times, recognising care as repair embraces the notion that “when people [ and indeed systems] confront their failures, they have the opportunity to mend them”. Clear consideration of the complex shape of the terrain and its substrata is essential, as is resistance. Harder to grow, yet fundamental, are the seeds of community, collaboration and commitment which can restore and recreate a deeply damaged sector.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Professor Laura Czerniewicz (http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/cilt/about/laura-czerniewicz) director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching will present the reflections of and by learning and teaching professionals and academics from 15 of the 27 South African universities.