Pandemia: The personal and professional costs of universities’ response to COVID-19

9th June 2022 : 14:00 - 15:00

Category: Webinar

Speaker: Richard Watermeyer, University of Bristol

Location: Zoom webinar, registration required

Audience: Public

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.

This webinar is part of the free public seminar programme hosted by the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE).