Higher education and its post-coronial future: utopian hopes and dystopian fears at Cambridge University during Covid-19

Higher education and its post-coronial future: utopian hopes and dystopian fears at Cambridge University during Covid-19

COVID-19; higher education; dystopia; utopia

The Covid-19 crisis has given rise to existential questions around the university during and after Covid-19. How might we re-imagine the future of HE and the post-coronial university? This article reflects on utopian and dystopian imaginaries which have emerged from the pandemic by narrating the hopes and fears for the future as held and felt by students and academics at the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University. My podcast Cambridge Quaranchats forms part of the methodology of this project: set up as an affective, collaborative and open access audio journal, I have used podcasting since the beginning of the UK lockdown to publicly document the crisis of Covid-19 and its impact on Cambridge’s academic community. Podcast conversations were used in private research interviews with students and academics to sonically elicit further reflections on new horizons of the possible for the post-coronial university. The resulting data reveal that in the shift to online learning, the most prominent fears connect to the loss of education as an embodied and communal experience. A fully online university is consistently described as a dystopian outcome of the pandemic, yet moving some educational activities online may lead to increased accessibility and participation in HE. The post-coronial university will need to develop a blended approach to education that safely and flexibly combines virtual with face-to-face teaching in order to inclusively accommodate the diverse needs of students, whilst retaining a sense of embodiment and community in HE.

Simone Eringfeld

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2020.1859681

Studies in Higher Education, Taylor & Francis

17 Dec 2020

url

ENG

journal article

https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1859681

UK

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2020.1859681