The global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people’s work-life balance across the world. For academics, confinement policies enacted by most countries have implied a sudden switch to home-work, a transition to online teaching and mentoring, and an adjustment of research activities. In this article, the authors, led by COUPLED member Esteve Corbera, discuss how the COVID-19 crisis is affecting our profession and how it may change it in the future. They argue that academia must foster a culture of care, help us refocus on what is most important, and redefine excellence in teaching and research. Such re-orientation can make academic practice more respectful and sustainable, now during confinement but also once the pandemic has passed. They conclude providing practical suggestions on how to renew our practice, which inevitably entails re-assessing the social-psychological, political, and environmental implications of academic activities and our value systems.
Read the full article
Esteve Corbera, Isabelle Anguelovski, Jordi Honey-Rosés &Isabel Ruiz-Mallén (2020): Academia in the Time of COVID-19: Towards an Ethics of Care. Planning Theory & Practice. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2020.1757891
The article is a reworked version on an earlier blog post by COUPLED member Esteve Corbera on the same issue, which received hundreds of signatories and benefited from a few constructive insights that we incorporated into the paper version.
Figure
Carlotta Cataldi. Published in Corbera et al. Academia in the Time of COVID-19: Towards an Ethics of Care. Planning Theory & Practice. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2020.1757891