Forum 52: The Humanities and Social Sciences and Covid-19: Pros and Cons

For the past two years, research groups and universities have been, exposed to the novel and unpredictable conditions of life during the viral pandemic, and to the constantly shifting restrictions on normal academic activities that have accompanied it. In particular, personal contacts—between teachers and students and between colleagues- have to a large extent been difficult or impossible. For some, the social restrictions have been a disaster, while others have found them to be an insignificant nuisance, or even welcome. Participants of the “Forum” discuss, how the pandemic has affected their own (work) situation and the situation at their home institution, whether the enforced (self-)isolation has created any new types of working practices or social relations that are desirable to persist in the future, and whether the humanities and social sciences have evolved any new research questions and topics that directly derive from the pandemic, the social restrictions associated with it, and efforts to fight its effects. © 2022, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

The Academicians on Quarantine: Reflexivity and Fragility of the Privileged Group at the Start of Pandemic

The goal of this article is to analyze the challenges faced by social researchers during the first months of the pandemic of 2020 when work-life issues were problematized and academic routine changed. The article is based on a dataset of diaries in which researchers with an academic background in social sciences and humanities were fixing their everyday life and reflecting on its changes. We explore why academicians, a relatively privileged group due to their possibilities of safe remote-working and maintaining professional obligations during the period of lockdown, experienced strong moral emotions related to work. We argue that basic references of space and time lost their routine structure, hindered work productivity, and threatened the "proper", disciplined, and productive academic self. In their written narratives, participants of the project describe different emotional responses to this situation, with a focus on negative feelings including anxiety and guilt. The new reality was characterized by the layering of previously separated tasks at the same time and space boundaries, and therefore, in overload. At the same time, academicians were deprived of routine forms of face-to-face professional communications and networking. Academicians are oriented towards self-discipline and productivity, and self is produced via normative (self) evaluation and the juxtaposition with reference group(s). When the rules are changed, unstable, or constantly violated, it threatens the self. Moral emotions indicate this process until the new social order becomes inhabited and routinized.