Pandemia: The personal and professional costs of universities’ response to COVID-19
- Richard Watermeyer, University of Bristol
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In this talk, Richard Watermeyer will present findings from empirical research undertaken over the course of the last two years in multiple international higher education settings that reveal the professional and personal impact of universities’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic on their staff. He will showcase the experience of academic and professional service staff in transitioning (both in an emergency and longer-term context) to remote working practices and in adjusting to or resisting crisis-management conditions. The pandemic will be shown to have laid bare and exacerbated an underlying crisis of higher education, particularly in aggressively marketised (and internationalised) systems. ‘Pandemia’ is accordingly presented as a clarion call for universities to privilege an ethic of care, too often neglected if not lost in higher education’s hyper-competitive prestige and performance culture and yet core to the ongoing transformation of universities as educational institutions in a milieu of unprecedented change.
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Richard Watermeyer is Professor of Higher Education and Co-Director of the Centre for Higher Education Transformations at the University of Bristol. He is by training and orientation, a sociologist of higher education with expertise related especially to academic praxis; institutional and research governance; scientific accountability and engagement; and higher education policy reform. His recent books include: Competitive Accountability in Academic Life: The struggle for social impact and public legitimacy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar) and The Impact Agenda: Controversies, Consequences and Challenges (Bristol: Policy). Over the last two years, much of Richard’s work has focused on the transformational challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic on university communities around the world, with a special focus on the issues of health and wellbeing for academic and professional service staff. He is currently leading an international team of researchers exploring the experience of ‘long-COVID’ faced by university staff in countries spanning the Global North and South.