Abstract
AbstractThis chapter focuses on how the coronavirus pandemic disrupted ‘normal’ academic life and travel through an analysis of my own travel history over the past decade. After contextualising the ways in which quarantines and confinement radically decreased travel, the chapter has three parts. In the first part, I document my own curriculum vitae of academic travel over the past decade and quantitatively measure my estimated CO2 emissions. Next, I seek to situate the value of such academic travel in both quantitative and qualitative terms, through extrinsic measures such as publications and impact and through intrinsic values such as the experience of different cultures and places. Lastly, I look at the transition to virtual events and my own participation in online events during the past nine months and consider the relation between physical and virtual meetings within academic practices. Insofar as the pandemic demonstrated our ability to transform academic travel and accelerate the use of remote meetings within academic practices, a pressing concern is how to find ways of extending this into the post-pandemic phase. Among the questions I ask in conclusion are: What possibilities are there for more seriously extending remote no-fly meetings to address the climate emergency? And what are the implications of such changes, both positive and negative?
Highlights
As I sit here at my home in Philadelphia on a rainy day, nine months into the pandemic, my Facebook page keeps sending me photos of ‘memories’ that I posted long ago: here I am one year ago enjoying a warm, hearty meal with friends in South Korea; here I am visiting a Christmas market in Vienna in 2018; here I am on a beautiful turquoise shore on Rottnest Island, off Perth, Australia, in 2017
A key question arises: How do we find ways of extending this abnormal situation into the post-pandemic reopening of travel? Klöwer et al (2020) make several recommendations on how to cut down on academic travel
The COVID-19 confinement has instigated a reorganization of many aspects of academic travel that seemed to be ‘locked in’ and difficult to change (Higham et al, 2019)
Summary
As I sit here at my home in Philadelphia on a rainy day, nine months into the pandemic (during which I have mostly not travelled at all), my Facebook page keeps sending me photos of ‘memories’ that I posted long ago: here I am one year ago enjoying a warm, hearty meal with friends in South Korea; here I am visiting a Christmas market in Vienna in 2018; here I am on a beautiful turquoise shore on Rottnest Island, off Perth, Australia, in 2017 These travel memories (all arising from academic work-related trips) precipitate from ‘the cloud’ as reminders of a time before COVID-19 halted travel. Air travel experienced a 60–90 per cent decrease in daily activity during confinement level 3 In some ways, this prefigured a world of radically reduced mobilities as climate activists like Greta Thunberg have demanded.
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