146. Universities recuperating during environmental, health, and social crises
Sharon Traweek, UCLA; Knut H Sørensen, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
The pandemic is significantly altering our understanding of the local and transnational political economies of illness and wellness practices in every aspect of our multiple, intersecting ecologies: our bodies, communities, work, governments, political economies, environment, etc.) exposing critical underlying conditions, increasingly seen as systemic. Universities are not protected from these forces, rather, they are struggling to cope during these simultaneous local and global ecological crises: the pandemic, global warming, and structural inequities, including precarity, and racism. In addition, universities strive with corporatization, bureaucratization, and their work culture as we have explored in our recent book Questing Excellence in Academia: A Tale of Two Universities (Routledge, 2022; click the title to access the link for a free digital version of the full book).
When hopefully we reunite in December 2022 in Chulula, perhaps we can recuperate while acknowledging the depth and the interferences of our nested global ecological crises. In that context, we invite papers that address these topics:
How have universities around the world, including their faculty and students, dealt with everyday knowledge making and circulation during those tightly inter-related crises?
How are these ‘temporary’ practices already reconfiguring our worlds of studying, teaching, and researching together in the shared spaces called universities?
What are the long-term implications of the current patchworked assemblage of attempted remedies as it becomes increasingly clear there will be no return to some ‘normal’ state from a perhaps idealized past?
What are effective strategies for intervening in the bricolage architecture of the new emerging university apparatus?
