Faculty as Nonpersons at Pandemic U

Teaching and Learning Anthropology, 2021

Author(s): Jayaram, Kiran; Pajunen, Matthew; Garcia, Chad; Nunez, Neudy Carolina; Smith, Jae-Anne | Abstract: In Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced university instructors across the United States to confront the daunting task of quickly changing their courses from face-to-face to remote instruction. Nationally, universities relied on virtual platforms as they adjusted educational spaces in response to the pandemic. While there have been many anecdotes of how individual faculty responded to this transition, social scientists have yet to study systematically how instructors handled this transition. This article presents and analyzes data from semi-structured interviews with non-tenure-track social science faculty to understand how they handled the change to remote teaching after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It analyzes these interviews by drawing on intersecting perspectives from the anthropology of disaster, anthropology of education, and digital anthropology. We argue ...

Journal of interactive media in education, 2021

ADVANCE Journal, 2021

Scholars have argued that higher education is a “greedy institution” that monopolizes employees’ time and energy. Further, women and minoritized faculty bear the heaviest burdens of these demands with respect to teaching and service. In this auto-ethnographic paper, we explore the escalating demands of the greedy institution during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ADE Bulletin, 2013

Bedan Research Journal

COVID-19 has greatly affected the education sector compelling educators to adapt to online teaching and platforms quite abruptly. Thus, this study aims to determine the impact of this pandemic on the life of college faculty and its consequences on their social, emotional, and personal aspects due to the transition from physical classes to online lectures and design a support program to help reframe and alleviate its impacts. This is a descriptive study using a convergent mixed methods design. Employing a snowball sampling technique, a modified web-based global questionnaire that is divided into 7 sections, was administered via Google forms. With the use of SPSS v. 23, results showed from 81 respondents in 37 universities that despite the limited time and resources in the preparation, the faculty displayed an adaptive behavior. Remarkably, the narratives related impacts of emergency remote education on personal life circumstances more than what the figures showed in the statistical a...

To Improve the Academy, 2021

In this essay, we describe our experience as a racially and disciplinarily diverse, relatively junior program team who embraced the opportunity to transform a 20-year-old professional development seminar for graduate students into a remote offering in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our efforts to support our participants and champion an institutional move towards equitable and effective virtual programming are situated alongside the psychological tolls of remote work, a global health crisis, and ongoing racial violence across the United States. We recount our experience using a helpful metaphor based on what has come to be known as the "changes as three steps" or "CATS" model (Schein 1996), which describes the process of "unfreezing" "changing" and "refreezing" long-standing assumptions and practices, to bring about positive cultural changes within an organization. In particular, we highlight the tools and practices we implemented to increase equitable online engagement, while simultaneously offsetting the burden on program facilitators who were constrained in time and resources. We then offer some reflections about possibilities afforded by intentionally-designed, communitycentered virtual professional development programs for graduate students and beyond.

Fast Capitalism, 2020

Pandemic of Perspectives: Creative Reimaginings, Routledge, 2022

Communication, Culture and Critique, 2021

2021

In the online community of global higher education, idiosyncrasy and sociality are mutually reinforcing forces that shape the cognitive aspirations and anxieties of students, teachers, administrators, and other players who are pulled together and apart by social problems and competing demands. During the global crisis caused by COVID-19, idiosyncrasy prevailed, in part owing to growing disagreements on the value of various strategies for disease containment, mandatory measures to prevent outbreaks, and social responses to the pandemic. Living in a politicized and increasingly polarized environment, where consensus was lacking on whether protecting public health should come ahead of opening the economy, implied numerous tensions for local and international learners alike. This chapter employs virtual autoethnography to provide a self-reflexive perspective on being a citizen and an academic operating during pandemic-driven lockdown in globally interconnected cyberspace, which can act as a sanctuary but also as a space where pandemonium is created by the emotional tribulations and conflicting messages of disparate local and international actors. With an analytical approach to autoethnography contributing to the discourse on stress and anxiety in global higher education, this chapter calls for deeper engagement with idiosyncrasy to enable a better understanding of the diverse and conflicting narratives and memories that shape our increasingly cyber-bound societies.