ABSTRACT
2020 (Introduction) Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto 125 Abolish Marisol LeBrón 128 Asynchronous Monica L. Miller 134 COVID Silver Linings Ann Cvetkovich 139 Essential Worker Julie Livingston 144 Food-in-Place (Shelter-in-Place) Psyche Williams-Forson 148 Mask Ruha Benjamin 151 Mutual Aid Christina Hanhardt 152 PPE Harris Solomon, Neelima Navuluri, Charles W. Hargett, Peter S. Kussin 158 Risk Factor Noémi Tousignant 163 Social Distancing Joshua Chambers-Letson 169 Stay at Home Tiana Reid 175 Supply Chain Management Miriam Posner 178 Synchronous Racquel Gates 181 Wave/Forest Fire Sari Altschuler 187 Zoom Gayle Wald 192 Zoonosis (Virus) Banu Subramaniam 196 2020 Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto Academic projects are often born from desire. Essential workers—disproportionately Black and Brown—were ordered to continue working, while others began "panic baking" and "panic shopping" (the disappearance of flour, yeast, and toilet paper from grocery stores marked the first quarter of the year).1 While some buried their dead in anguish and isolation,2 others purchased real estate, thanks to record-low interest rates and new demands for more space as houses were transformed into offices and schools.3 In some ways, this is a quintessentially American story—the variety of ways that crisis is experienced and inhabited, with the starkest and most deathly outcomes reserved for those most precarious as the capitalist machine keeps rolling along. Bleeding into 2021, crisis and critique have merged into a lexicon that is repeated, rehearsed, rehashed, remade.5 These terms have become part of a collective vocabulary, a shared index for describing the relentless conditions of the present, even as that present is experienced and endured differently. Media has obsessively reported that this is a crisis that mostly women are bearing, but universities have done far too little to recognize these facts on the ground for caretakers, including the return to in-campus teaching when vaccines are not available for children under twelve.6 We name this as two senior scholars, keenly aware of how "home-schooling" disproportionately affects junior women scholars and primary caretaker colleagues navigating the dual demands of tenure and caregiving. [...]the same is true of race, as institutions have begun diversity trainings, hired diversity coordinators, promised diversity cluster hires, and launched university-wide reckonings with race and "DEI."
ABSTRACT
THE ASYMMETRICAL, UNCOMPENSATED LABORS OF ACADEME have been the object of feminist scrutiny for years-well before the global outbreak of COVID-19.1 Noting the obvious "parallels with family life," critics long have observed that feminized faculty tend to take on, or to be tasked with, a disproportionate amount of institutional caretaking: non-research and non-teaching functions such as serving on institutional committees, managing admissions processes, writing student letters of recommendation, and advising, mentoring, and counseling students from underrepresented and marginalized communities navigating hostile or indifferent environments.2 Research plainly shows that such caring labor is disproportionately conducted by feminized workers, and increasingly feminized workers of color.3 Advice for how to rectify these inequities, echoing the victim-blaming bromides delivered to overwhelmed housewives, often is reduced to individual behavioral modification, as when "senior female professors" are encouraged to "model self-restraint" for untenured faculty members by "learning how to say 'no. Small regional private colleges with low endowments currently face financial pressures distinct from vocational twoyear colleges, online credentialing programs, or top-tier global research universities;state regulations and revenue streams vary by national and regional context;religiously-affiliated institutions embody entanglements that non-religiously affiliated institutions do not;in the US context, HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges, and predominantly white institutions occupy dissimilar social positions. The broad outlines of that restructuring are likely familiar to most readers of this academic journal: government divestment from public higher education, increased student fees and tuitions, the corporatization of university administration, the expansion of contingent and disposable teaching labor, the focus on education as a "deliverable" for students to "consume," the extension of working hours through 24/7 email availability, etc.8 Take, for example, the United States, where our academic labor is physically located (even as it is Zoom-distributed elsewhere): as recently as three decades ago, 75 percent of working faculty members were tenured or tenure track;now it is roughly 25 percent, depending on how online educators are tallied.9 The new contingent majority often teach, advise, write, and think in highly precarious conditions, commuting weekly, if not daily, between multiple campuses. Exhausting emotional and manual labor can remain inadequately recognized and compensated as long as that labor is effectively naturalized as maternal affection or feminine empathy.17 Already, in the pre-pandemic university, the affective imperative to work excessively out of love (for literature, for science, etc.) provided a means of access to the academic professional's embodied labor power - access shaped, as ever, by hierarchies of race, language, citizenship, gender, sexuality, age, and ability.
ABSTRACT
In the last few decades, we have seen a steady rise in Hindu nationalism in India, culminating in a Hindu nationalist government in 2014. The BJP won again and expanded its majority in 2019. Then COVID‐19 hit! This essay explores the national and body politic in India during COVID‐19. It argues that Hindu nationalism has been mobilized and strengthened during the pandemic.