Care in the Time of COVID-19: Accounting for Academic Care Labor

Abstract

This article engages with care as an increasingly marketed yet inconsistently articulated and accounted form of labor in the space of the university. As the COVID-19 crisis has thrown into sharp relief the inequities and fragilities of an increasingly market-driven university sector, it has also enabled us to reframe questions surrounding what we value about and within the university. In order to explore faculty perceptions and distributions of care as it was expected and performed in universities during the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted a qualitative survey. Results demonstrated that while care is an increasingly essential feature of academic labor, it remains largely invisible, misunderstood, unaccounted for, and unequally distributed.

Keywords:

• care labor
• neoliberal university
• feminist economics
• higher education

JEL Classification Codes:

• I21
• J41
• B54
• B55

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Our study is focused upon higher education institutions in North America and Western Europe.

2 Hochschild defines emotional labor as “seldom recognized, rarely honoured, and almost never taken into account by employers as a source of on-the-job stress” (1983, 153). Her work focuses on the flight attendant as emblem of a caring profession, but it is interesting to consider how the academic too performs care in the service of their profession.

3 Indeed each of the authors of this paper were subject to these cuts (in 2020, 2021, and 2022). We want to make very clear that this survey and paper were administered and written before our positions were cut and not in response.

4 Writing in Nature, Madeline Bodin notes that a Times Higher Education survey “finds that 12% of respondents are planning redundancies for faculty members and staff in the next six months, with 19% planning furloughs or compulsory paid leave, and 12% planning pay cuts” (2020). Douglas Belkin’s December 2020 article in the Wall Street Journal notes that American universities “employed about 150,000 fewer workers in September than they did a year earlier, before the pandemic… That is a decline of nearly 10%. Along the way, they are changing the centuries-old higher education power structure.” In Australia, it is estimated that research intensive universities will “lose 6,700 staff in the coming months, with researchers on fixed-term contracts making up some 4,400 of that group” (Ross and Mickie 2020). Layoffs at the University of Portsmouth, where English literature staff were cut, and Ohio University, which announced faculty cuts in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, have been controversial and well-publicized. We are aware of similar layoffs, for example at our own university where the Literature program was cut. It will take years to know the full extent of COVID-19 austerity.

5 We did not use the data from nine respondents who answered only demographic questions.

6 Two respondents who selected “no” responded to this question.

7 Three responses were unable to be coded.

8 Responses to question 43 regarding the burden of care largely misunderstood “demographics” focusing largely on which positions (e.g., faculty or staff) perform care; however, those who did focus on demographics cited: women, POC, WOC, people in minority groups, and junior faculty.

9 This is not to suggest that research does not involve both being careful and caring about the subject of study or the care in research and collaboration networks but rather refers to the interpersonal and face-to-face aspects of caring in much of the labor involved in teaching and research. Our use of “burden” is meant to emphasize the psychological, emotional and temporal demands of caring.

10 A recent article in Nature discusses the great resignation in the context of higher education and the #leavingacademia trend on social media (Gewin 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Poulomi Dasgupta

Poulomi Dasgupta is visiting faculty at Siena College and a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Global Prosperity, with research interests in political economy, development economics, postcolonial economics, labor and labor movements and sustainable development. Alexandra Peat teaches at the School of English and Creative Arts, University of Galway and, with Emily Ridge, has recently co-edited a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review on the discourses of Emotional Labor. Alison E. Vogelaar works in policy and communication consulting and is an advisor and newsletter editor with the Academic Parity Movement. All authors are equal contributors.

Alexandra Peat

Poulomi Dasgupta is visiting faculty at Siena College and a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Global Prosperity, with research interests in political economy, development economics, postcolonial economics, labor and labor movements and sustainable development. Alexandra Peat teaches at the School of English and Creative Arts, University of Galway and, with Emily Ridge, has recently co-edited a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review on the discourses of Emotional Labor. Alison E. Vogelaar works in policy and communication consulting and is an advisor and newsletter editor with the Academic Parity Movement. All authors are equal contributors.

Alison E. Vogelaar

Poulomi Dasgupta is visiting faculty at Siena College and a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Global Prosperity, with research interests in political economy, development economics, postcolonial economics, labor and labor movements and sustainable development. Alexandra Peat teaches at the School of English and Creative Arts, University of Galway and, with Emily Ridge, has recently co-edited a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review on the discourses of Emotional Labor. Alison E. Vogelaar works in policy and communication consulting and is an advisor and newsletter editor with the Academic Parity Movement. All authors are equal contributors.