Chaos, Care, and Critique: Performing the Contemporary Academy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Sarah R Davies

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.657823

Abstract

The starting point for this article is that the COVID-19 global pandemic has brought normally invisible, taken-for-granted aspects of contemporary societies into sharp relief. I explore the analytical affordances of this moment through a focus on the nature of the contemporary academy, asking how this was performed on “academic Twitter” in the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, therefore contributing to work that has characterized contemporary university, research practice, and social media discussion of this. I draw on a dataset of tweets from academic Twitter, systematically downloaded between 1 March and 24 July 2020, that are concerned with the pandemic, analyzing these through a qualitative, multimodal, and practice-oriented approach. I identify themes of the disruption of academic work, of care and care practices, and of critiques of injustice and inequity within academia, but also argue that the ways in which these topics are instantiated—through distinctive repertoires of humor and of emotional honesty, positivity, and gratitude—are central to performances of academic life. The analysis thus further contributes to studies of communication to and by other publics, and in particular, the ways in which the content and form of social media communication are intertwined.

Highlights

I would like to start, if I may, with an anecdote from my own experiences during the early days of the pandemic in Europe
I want both to return to my research question—how was the contemporary academy performed on “academic Twitter” in the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic?—and to offer some more general reflections on the implications of these findings in the context of the literatures discussed at the start of the article
In examining how the contemporary academy was performed on “academic Twitter” in the early months of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, I have argued that academic life is enacted in this material as oriented to productivity and as involving rhythms of solitude and sociality, as lacking in care, and as often operating in unjust or unequal ways

Summary

Introduction

I would like to start, if I may, with an anecdote from my own experiences during the early days of the pandemic in Europe. In common with many others, my memory of those first days is of uncertainty, of rules and recommendations changing almost by the hour, and of a desperate search for new information. Those early hours, days, and weeks were marked by a dedication to media both new and old. I was, both and struck by the extent to which (my) sense-making was taking place through social media This was a year in which the term “doomscrolling” (Markham, 2020) rose to prominence, and the notion perfectly captures my memory of obsessive scrolling through feeds in an effort to garner more knowledge, more certainty more collective meaning. Social media showed me how (some versions and parts of) academia were experiencing and defining this moment of crisis and change

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion