ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 crisis has given rise to existential questions around the university during and after Covid-19. How might we re-imagine the future of HE and the post-coronial university? This article reflects on utopian and dystopian imaginaries which have emerged from the pandemic by narrating the hopes and fears for the future as held and felt by students and academics at the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University. My podcast Cambridge Quaranchats forms part of the methodology of this project: set up as an affective, collaborative and open access audio journal, I have used podcasting since the beginning of the UK lockdown to publicly document the crisis of Covid-19 and its impact on Cambridge’s academic community. Podcast conversations were used in private research interviews with students and academics to sonically elicit further reflections on new horizons of the possible for the post-coronial university. The resulting data reveal that in the shift to online learning, the most prominent fears connect to the loss of education as an embodied and communal experience. A fully online university is consistently described as a dystopian outcome of the pandemic, yet moving some educational activities online may lead to increased accessibility and participation in HE. The post-coronial university will need to develop a blended approach to education that safely and flexibly combines virtual with face-to-face teaching in order to inclusively accommodate the diverse needs of students, whilst retaining a sense of embodiment and community in HE.

摘要

在Covid-19期间和之后，Covid-19危机引起了大学周围存在的问题。我们如何重新想象高等教育学院和后加冕时代大学的未来？本文通过叙述剑桥大学教育学院的学生和学者对未来的希望和恐惧，来反思大流行中出现的乌托邦和反乌托邦想象。我的Podcast Cambridge Quaranchats构成该项目方法论的一部分：作为一本情感，协作和开放获取的音频期刊，自英国封锁以来，我就一直使用播客来公开记录Covid-19危机及其对剑桥学术界的影响。在与学生和学者进行的私人研究访谈中，使用了播客对话，以超音速地引起人们对加冕后大学的新视野的进一步思考。所得数据表明，在向在线学习的转变中，最突出的担忧与作为具体的公共体验的教育损失有关。完全将一所完全在线的大学描述为大流行的反乌托邦结果，但是将一些教育活动在线转移可能会导致访问和参与高等教育的机会增加。