Abstract
As countries went into the first lockdown, within academia, physical space lost its relevance. It became much easier to hop around the world and join this and that virtual workshop, webinar or lecture, but also much more difficult to keep a sense of local professional community. There are no more informal meetings of colleagues in the corridors or for lunch or coffee, which contribute so much—at least for me—to the feeling that one “belongs” and that one’s workplace is a living organism. Between January and the EJWS Symposium in April 2021, I had given five guest talks on two continents and ‘in’ five different countries without having to reschedule a class, but I knew little about the audiences attending the talks. Online communication has made administrative meetings at the university much less time-consuming and more efficient because one spends no time in transit between the various locations on campus, and people tend to dispense with non-essential communication. But I also no longer know what ails or drives my colleagues, nor have I spoken socially to any of them for a year. Our professional lives suffered an unprecedented degree of atomization, as we sat in our individual home offices and conducted our purposeful communication: teach a class from 10:00 to 11:30; sign, scan and email this and that form; listen to a lecture from 13:00 to 14:00; attend a meeting from 14:00 to 16:00—and then either continue with our other projects or switch instantaneously to one of our domestic roles. Any sense of community and professional connections gradually diminished as the pandemic dragged on.
If the early weeks of the first wave of Covid-19 in the spring of 2020 turned our professional and personal lives upside down, they also brought an acute sense of solidarity and care. I received emails from academic friends with whom I had not been in touch for a long time, asking about my wellbeing, and I had written similar emails in return. With some, we even connected via video-communication platforms—just for a friendly chat. It was perhaps because our usual everyday connections were pulled from under our feet, we had nowhere to go and no one to see: conferences, book presentations, field research, research visits and all manner of meetings disappeared practically overnight, along with classroom and office spaces. For many—or most—this was a time of extreme stress from the piling up of roles and obligations: they needed to educate themselves about virtual teaching and learning modalities, about their children’s school subjects; they had to convert their courses into a virtual format overnight and take care of their families’ needs around the clock. And all of that in a dramatically reduced physical space.
For a life-long commuter like myself, however, the lockdown brought a much-needed slowing down that allowed for reflection and time for family and friends. Having to move constantly between places means that one’s office is always packed away in one’s backpack and online communication tools are a must. After the initial shock of the realisation of the extent to which the travel restrictions were going to affect my research activities, I gained an appreciation for social interactions I did not know I was sorely missing in my pre-pandemic everyday: the luxury of sitting down to dinner every evening with my family, a pleasure normally reserved for weekends during the teaching semester; or the joy of conversations with friends from around the world, with whom we otherwise barely manage to exchange Christmas cards. All that spread nurturing warmth through body and soul and replenished energy supplies. I was acutely aware of the privilege I enjoyed due to my individual circumstances (a tenured job, a fully furnished home office and minimal disturbances during working hours, not to mention unrestricted access to fresh air in our rural abode), but much more importantly, others made me feel that I was surrounded by a caring community in the virtual space. The slowing down, the care and solidarity I was offered and the forced attention to the minutiae of my pared down daily routine proved a fertile ground for new ideas—and perhaps especially for a gender scholar. I began a new research project—on gender and use of time in couples in families with schoolchildren during the first lockdown…
That was the first few weeks. Things began to change after that.
The university administration woke up from the initial stupor induced by the swift lockdown orders, and administrative duties returned with a vengeance. The calendar filled with virtual meeting dates, replacing the cancelled ones from earlier on and adding new ones; updates on Covid-19 regulations and instructions began to arrive in my email inbox with alarming frequency. Add to that surveys and reports: what is the proportion of virtual/in attendance elements in your courses? What is your experience with online platforms? Which methods do you use in your online classes? Plus, petitions to mitigate the negative consequences of Covid-19: on work-life balance, on early career researchers, on precariously employed academics, on academics with schoolchildren. The members of my virtual caring community must have experienced something similar, because the informal calls and emails stopped—I also stopped reaching out to others. My new research project began to stall, too. Administrative chores crowded out inspired ideas from my schedule—and from my mind. A list of virtual talks and workshops I meant to attend and did not manage to find the time for grew ever longer. Participating in academic activism through surveys and petitions made one aware of the surrounding hardship, in which most academics—and, particularly, women—found themselves. By the end of 2020 came the realisation that most of the things that made our profession rewarding had gone away, while the less enjoyable aspects remained. Gone were the “professional socials” at conferences or on campus, gone was interaction with students in three dimensions that would provide feedback on my performance and whether the students and I were on the same page during a class, and research became limited more or less to whatever I could do from my desk. Administrative load did not diminish, but rather intensified (I know because I kept track of the hours before the pandemics and during), I realised how much actual paperwork there was, as I stood daily at the printer and scanner in my home office, dealing with signing this or that piece of paper, since an e-signature was not enabled in most cases.
I remain sceptical about university administrations drawing lessons from the unique experience of the last year and a half that would truly consider its gendered dimensions, because they either remained unarticulated or became subsumed under other categories. I do retain hope, however, for a much larger impact at a societal level, because of the visibility of gender and pervasiveness of gender issues during the pandemic, such as the feminization of the frontline work in the health sector and essential services or the consequences of school closures, particularly for women. Gender can no longer be written off as a fashion or niche interest—or should not be, given the experience of the pandemic. As the public health crisis unfolded, governments had to concern themselves with embodiment—which bodies did what, for whom and with what consequences? —and make provisions for those (gendered) bodies, in order to navigate their countries’ through the pandemic. The pandemic also revealed the tragic inadequacy of the gendered imaginary of a security threat: the masculine-coded militaristic discourse of “enemy” and “combat” dominated the early months of reporting on the virus. By now (in autumn 2021) - at least in Austrian news - it is heard less and less. It has been replaced with “resilience”, a concept that was not prominent before and that does not seem to have gendered connotations in the Austrian context. There is now a question about the extent to which governments utilise this new visibility of gender for a productive “re-gendering” of research funding priorities toward making our societies more resilient to future public health or environmental crises.