Disorientation, disbelief, distance

Abstract

This chapter discusses personal experiences of being an academic during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in a Northern European university city. In this context, the COVID-19 restrictions and public health policies affected every single aspect of sociality even if, to the date of writing, an actual epidemic did not accelerate in this society. The article discusses the experience of the government implementing a range of restrictions since mid-March 2020, which were surprisingly successful in halting the epidemic, yet with profound social consequences, also affecting the content of academic scholarship. Three interconnected themes will be discussed: Social isolation and academic motivation; feminist politics of knowledge production and epistemological considerations; and vulnerability, loss, and imposed social distancing connected to microbial co-existence and safety/privilege as a loss.

Experiencing a slow passage of time was an indicator of social and temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 pandemic

“…To this end, we rescaled each component between − 2 and + 2, with 0 meaning no experienced temporal or social disruptions. The disorientation-orientation axis offers a helpful framework through which to encompass the diverse disruptions across temporal, social and affective domains [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43] . In contrast, the two components of interest related to time judgements functioned between slow versus fast time on the one hand, and long versus short time on the other, and couldn't be a priori reduced plotted onto a disorientation-orientation spectrum.…”

Eroding Inclusions and Expanding Exclusions: Education During Pandemics

“…Tastsoglou and Nourpanah (2022) recorded that some faculty were sought as public experts by the media, but becoming more public is fraught with new fears of trolling, complaints, and being on the receiving end of cyber abuse-a type of violence directed particularly to marginalised groups. Oinas (2022) additionally pointed out that the quest for good scientific data-for predicting the direction of the pandemic-to pit against fake news, also resulted in the unintended consequence of marginalisation of the qualitative data for which many social science and humanities-oriented scholars had fought for recognition within education realms. The quest for dealing with certainties meant technology-oriented education seemed to be more important than broader education that focused on developing the ability to question and critically analyse information.…”

“…At the same time, Gurung (2022), Oinas (2022) and Heath (2022) pointed out that even if groups were safe from the pandemic in their countries, international collaboration-predicated on the assumptions of scholars' access to 'normal', globalised interactions that enable collaboration-became tenuous, which is likely to affect assessment standards in future. For the countries where international collaboration was already frowned upon, collaborating over technological platforms, that are more easily scrutinised by governments and platform owners, introduced new dangers of being viewed as ʻanti-countryʼ.…”

Development and validation of a quantitative instrument for measuring temporal and social disorientation in the Covid-19 crisis

“…Social, spatial, and temporal disruptions, such as curfews, social distancing measures and repeated lockdowns (both current and potential), suddenly supersede the previous organization of life in sometimes confusing ways. Many authors have claimed that disorientation is a central element in people’s experience during the Covid-19 era [1, 2, 3, 4], with contributions coming from social psychology [5], geography [6], philosophy [7], ethnography [8] or cultural studies [9], to name but a few disciplines. Such discussions are not only in the purview of academic research, but are also common in mainstream culture, with the media explicitly discussing the disorienting nature of lockdowns [10], of reopening [11], of routine disruption [12], of Covid-19 data [13], of new waves [14], and of the pandemic as a whole [15].…”