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What prevents universities from ‘building back better’? Fault lines in university structures of care during the COVID-19 pandemic

Oliver, Martin; Littlejohn, Allison; Kennedy, Eileen; (2023) What prevents universities from ‘building back better’? Fault lines in university structures of care during the COVID-19 pandemic. European Journal of Higher Education 10.1080/21568235.2023.2265599. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Universities may have coped with the COVID-19 pandemic, but we argue there are still important lessons to be learnt from that experience of coping. In this paper, we explore whether universities could improve what they do, rather than just returning to pre-lockdown ways of working. We do this by analyzing a series of interviews with staff, recorded during the lockdown in the UK, using Tronto’s political theory of care. This analysis does not suggest that universities simply need to be more caring; it shows, instead, that they were already full of complex and overlapping caring activities. What staff accounts highlighted, however, were the fault lines between responsibilities for academic work and the tasks of caring; the competing priorities staff faced, between work, home and self; and how the burden of caring work was (and still is) unfairly distributed, with consequences for the wellbeing of staff. We conclude by suggesting that better-integrated caring practices are needed, and that developing these will require paying attention to the labour it takes to sustain academic work, and taking responsibility for helping the often-overlooked people who do this.

Type: Article
Title: What prevents universities from ‘building back better’? Fault lines in university structures of care during the COVID-19 pandemic
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/21568235.2023.2265599
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/21568235.2023.2265599
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author (s) or with their consent.
Keywords: COVID-19; lockdown; care theory; academic practice; university management
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Culture, Communication and Media
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179740
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