Roundtable on the impact of COVID and Open Access on Gender Studies Journal

Abstract

researchers, on precariously employed academics, on academics with schoolchildren. The members of my virtual caring community must have experienced something similar, because the informal calls and emails stopped—I also stopped reaching out to others. My new research project began to stall, too. Administrative chores crowded out inspired ideas from my schedule—and from my mind. A list of virtual talks and workshops I meant to attend and did not manage to find the time for grew ever longer. Participating in academic activism through surveys and petitions made one aware of the surrounding hardship, in which most academics—and, particularly, women—found themselves. By the end of 2020 came the realisation that most of the things that made our profession rewarding had gone away, while the less enjoyable aspects remained. Gone were the “professional socials” at conferences or on campus, gone was interaction with students in three dimensions that would provide feedback on my performance and whether the students and I were on the same page during a class, and research became limited more or less to whatever I could do from my desk. Administrative load did not diminish, but rather intensified (I know because I kept track of the hours before the pandemics and during), I realised how much actual paperwork there was, as I stood daily at the printer and scanner in my home office, dealing with signing this or that piece of paper, since an e-signature was not enabled in most cases. I remain sceptical about university administrations drawing lessons from the unique experience of the last year and a half that would truly consider its gendered dimensions, because they either remained unarticulated or became subsumed under other categories. I do retain hope, however, for a much larger impact at a societal level, because of the visibility of gender and pervasiveness of gender issues during the pandemic, such as the feminization of the frontline work in the health sector and essential services or the consequences of school closures, particularly for women. Gender can no longer be written off as a fashion or niche interest—or should not be, given the experience of the pandemic. As the public health crisis unfolded, governments had to concern themselves with embodiment—which bodies did what, for whom and with what consequences? —and make provisions for those (gendered) bodies, in order to navigate their countries’ through the pandemic. The pandemic also revealed the tragic inadequacy of the gendered imaginary of a security threat: the masculine-coded militaristic discourse of “enemy” and “combat” dominated the early months of reporting on the virus. By now (in autumn 2021) at least in Austrian news it is heard less and less. It has been replaced with “resilience”, a concept that was not prominent before and that does not seem to have gendered connotations in the Austrian context. There is now a question about the extent to which governments utilise this new visibility of gender for a productive “re-gendering” of research funding priorities toward making our societies more resilient to future public health or environmental crises.