by Amy Scott Metcalfe
This blog is a short summary of the author’s paper for a special issue of Studies in Higher Education published online in January 2021. This issue is currently free to access and includes a range of commissioned articles from academics worldwide about their experiences of Covid19 restrictions in 2020. Many of the authors featured in the Special Issue spoke about their contributions at the SRHE Webinar held on 27 January 2021. The paper presented the author’s account of the COVID-19 pandemic from a Canadian perspective, utilising an extended photo essay method and narrative response to document changes seen in the local university environment during the months of April through September 2020. Emerging literature and survey results concerning the Canadian academic condition during the pandemic are discussed in the article alongside research diary entries and policy excerpts. The images included here in this blog post are additional views from the extended photo essay, and were not reproduced in the author’s piece for the Special Issue.
Attempting to make sense of the 2020 pandemic can be understood, meta-cognitively speaking, as academia’s quintessential response to the unknown, coupled with a sector-wide existential crisis. For Studies in Higher Education’s special issue on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our lives, personally and professionally, I took a conscious approach toward self-expression and ‘research creation’ as a way to channel my mind/body reactions into something productive during this particularly stressful time. In selecting a photo essay format, augmented by ethnographic data collection and my research diary, my contribution to the special issue on “The impact of a pandemic – a global perspective” focuses on the changes the pandemic has brought to my work-life, my institution, and the Canadian university sector as a whole.
The impact of the pandemic on Canada’s higher education sector is yet to be extensively measured, but early indicators of the largely negative effects for students and faculty are coming to light (Firang, 2020; CAUT, 2020a). Fiscally, the mainly public Canadian higher education sector may encounter a cycle of retrenchment, as provincial governments face pandemic-related deficits and as previously anticipated tuition revenues might not be forthcoming (CAUT, 2020b). The negative effects of the pandemic on individual Canadian academics may endure for some time, potentially increasing inequality within a sector already beleaguered by gender disparities and racialization (Johnson and Howsam, 2020; Oleschuk, 2020).
In the article, I presented three consecutive photo essays that describe the conditions within the campus environment at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver between April and September 2020. Sequenced according to our local seasons (spring, summer, fall) and our institutional academic calendar (Winter 2, Summer, Winter 1), the images simultaneously portray moments in time/place and my somatic experiences. Each photo essay contains ten images, although due to space constraints just three per essay were reproduced in the article (nine overall). The complete photographic essays are available online (http://www.amyscottmetcalfe.com/). Within each section I offered temporal contextualisation in the form of narrative description, contemporaneous policy texts, dated excerpts from my research diary, and recently released preliminary findings from institutional and national surveys of faculty with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on academic life and work in Canada. The intent was to create a multimodal diary that collates my experiences as a Canadian academic during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020.
In this blog post I share three photos that were not reproduced in the article, but which are included in the online photo essays. These images are from the essay titled “Prepping,” which documented some of the visible changes to the campus that occurred over the summer months of 2020, as various campus units prepared for an uncertain fall semester. The larger photo essay includes images of signage and visual cues like floor stickers that were installed that summer to direct our movements throughout the campus to promote physical distancing. With some international and domestic students residing on campus, essential services such as food outlets were open, albeit in a limited fashion. To direct a one-way flow through these open buildings, some doors were locked, with “Do Not Enter” signs affixed to the exterior (Figure 1), to direct students and staff to other entrances. The cumulative effect of these large signs prohibiting entry is that of a campus environment that is both provisional and conditional—not the expected openness or enduring continuity we typically find in our public academic institutions.
Figure 1. Do Not Enter. Photo: Author.
The centre of student life on many North American campuses is the student services building, where young people gather for recreation, entertainment, mealtimes, and student club meetings. At my employing institution, the UBC Life building is a newly renovated space for student services, including International Student Advising and UBC’s Go Global program for study abroad opportunities. At present, the UBC Life building is partially open to provide limited food services and restricted use of a weight room and gym. From the exterior, the building exclaims “UBC Life” in large lettering (Figure 2), in sharp contrast to the largely vacant interior.
Figure 2. UBC Life. Photo: Author.
Figure 3. The Best Thing in Life is Life. Photo: Author.
Walking amongst the unused tables and chairs within the UBC Life building, adjacent to the dark windows of closed advising offices, a mural reminds us that “the best thing in life is life” (Figure 3). In the shadowy background, behind the overturned chairs, we can see the marquee of the now-closed student movie theatre still announcing film showings from March 2020, including a Vancouver International Film Festival viewing of “The World is Bright” (March 9, 6PM), a documentary that describes the grief of an elderly Chinese couple who travel to Canada to try to understand the death of their son, an immigrant who died on foreign soil. The showing of this film at UBC in March 2020 would soon be followed by the World Health Organization’s declaration of a global pandemic. Taken together, we might read the phrases from this institutional still life as a prefiguration of the hope and despair brought by COVID-19 in the 2020-2021 academic year. Even now, in early 2021 with vaccine delivery underway, Canadian universities are in a holding pattern, having put in place the mechanisms by which we might operate in suspended animation online into the (un)foreseeable future.
Dr Amy Scott Metcalfe is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research focuses on higher education in Canada and the North American region, including (post)critical approaches to internationalisation, academic labour and mobility, and critical policy studies in education. Dr Metcalfe has a particular interest in visual research methods in education, with an emphasis on photographic methodologies, art historical approaches, and visual analysis.
Works Cited
Firang, D (2020) ‘The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on International Students in Canada’ International Social Work, 1-5 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0020872820940030
CAUT (2020a) Post-Secondary Staff Concerned about Remote Teaching, Research, Health and Safety and Jobs Ottawa: Canadian Association of University Teachers. 20 August 2020 https://www.caut.ca/latest/2020/08/post-secondary-staff-concerned-about-remote-teaching-research-health-and-safety-and.
CAUT (2020b) Post-Secondary Educators Issue Urgent Call for Support to Offset Impacts of COVID-19 Ottawa: Canadian Association of University Teachers 1 May 2020 https://www.caut.ca/latest/2020/05/post-secondary-educators-issue-urgent-call-support-offset-impacts-covid-19.
Johnson, GF and R Howsam (2020) ‘Whiteness, Power and the Politics of Demographics in the Governance of the Canadian Academy’ Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 1–19 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-political-science-revue-canadienne-de-science-politique/article/whiteness-power-and-the-politics-of-demographics-in-the-governance-of-the-canadian-academy/E203CC4FD2A80D1B9E5E4B21D2989600
Oleschuk, M (2020) ‘Gender Equity Considerations for Tenure and Promotion During COVID-19’ Canadian Review of Sociology 57 (3): 502–515.
