Caring in the Mean/times

My first book, British Literature and Culture in Second World Wartime: For the Duration, was published in the Spring of 2020, when the first wave of the coronavirus hit the UK and we entered our first lockdown. Needless to say, it was not the historical season I imagined it to appear. The book is concerned with what I call late modernist chronophobia—a fear of the past and the future together—and with how individuals and the British state managed temporal anxieties in the years surrounding the Second World War. The work was part of a significant turn in modernist scholarship over the past decade which queried the usual distinctions between public and private time, the everyday and the event, found in canonical accounts of modernist time studies. Instead, the recent emphasis is on the politics of time as historically and collectively lived and felt, differentially: time not as an arena of passive experience, but of active social contestation, imagining, and revisioning.[1]

In a short piece about pandemic time after my book came out, I reflected on the convergence of its publication with our changed sense of the historical present, as we too seemed to be “dreading forward,” to quote from Henry Green, towards a future that appeared both unknowable and foregone.[2] It was a future with Covid, but one whose longer shape, effects, and consequences for individuals and societies remained unclear. Like many academics, I also found myself preoccupied with the politics of time which structure the academy, as we switched to online pedagogy overnight with little information and training on how to keep students’ well-being afloat. Then, while homeschooling my then four-year old and two-year old, I learned I was pregnant. Although the pandemic has stretched forward in time, like others born in that first year of reduced prenatal check-ups and minimal social interaction, my youngest is still called a “COVID baby.” Some of my experiences as an ethnic Chinese mother bringing up young children in a time of “Kung Flu” and Asian hate crime are still too difficult to articulate here.[3]

Facing different, overlapping duties of care—care for my students and care for my children, in addition to the overall care we felt for those around us who may have unknown, invisible, or latent vulnerabilities towards the air we share—I thought about the temporal politics of care work itself: new care work that Covid demanded, but old work too that Covid made newly visible.

This essay reflects on the neoliberal university’s intersections with Covid, not only during but before and after. I use the prefix “post,” not to denote sequentiality or a time “after” Covid, but to describe a certain handling of the pandemic which is characterizing our present: one where we are acclimatized to the virus’s disruptions and violence, where the pandemic has become just another part of everyday life, leaving public health measures such as mask-wearing and social distancing largely up to the individual. Many universities have quietly naturalized the crisis-time which seems to make up our present, but a temporal model of serving “the meantime” undergirded many institutions well before 2020. That context underpins the emerging data on Covid’s disproportionate impacts on women, faculty of color, and precariously-employed academics, pointing to important trajectories which lie outside of Covid as a “crisis” narrative.[4]

The Chronopolitics of Care

In their article “Time and the University,” Eli Meyerhoff, Elizabeth Johnson, and Bruce Braun dissect the commodification and marketization of higher education, and they critique the university’s metricization and audit culture, which subjects faculty members to continual scrutiny and puts them into competition against one another.[5] I draw from and extend some of their points below, but beyond two general categories—students and faculty—the scope of their piece does not involve the more variegated experiences of time and the university in relation to intersectional coordinates such as gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ableness and disability, class and national boundaries. As the collective authors of “For Slow Scholarship” point out, critiques of the neoliberal university tend not to discuss the embodied realities of academia’s spatial and temporal environment.[6]

For me, that environment was one that had seemed antithetical to maternal care. I had my first child while on a fixed-term fellowship which, at the time, did not guarantee maternity pay beyond the statutory requirement nor the extension of my contract; this in turn affected my right to remain in the UK. Struggling with the fact that “[f]ertilities demand care that is in conflict with markers of neoliberal academic demands,” I turned to scholarship on maternal time and on the temporality of care.[7] Drawing from queer and disability studies, I came to understand the modern university as “chrononormative,” in Elizabeth Freeman’s terms, as an organization, like many in late capitalism, that “use[s] . . . time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity.”[8] Time is used to direct bodies, Freeman argues, such that “institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts” (Time Binds, 3). I found inspiration in the work of Lisa Baraitser, who argues that care work is not “dead time” or “wasted” time as they might appear in chrononormative models, but can in fact contain “dynamic chronicity . . . [in being] alive to the potentials of not moving on, whilst at the same time maintaining its link with the ethical principle of one’s own future being bound up with the future of another.”[9] This had comforting resonance for me during the early days of Covid with the intertwining of our futures across bodies and continents, as we isolated ourselves, practiced social distancing, and cancelled much longed-for milestone gatherings.

When Covid arrived, another kind of care work was exploding within the modern university that seemed to involve its own temporal politics, which is the care work of academic labor. There is exceptional care work involved with students, of course, especially during an event of collective trauma like Covid, but academic workers were also being asked to “care for” the university too: to hold it together during this time of disruption, to maintain and sustain the institution for a post-covid future. Most academics I know committed to this, amidst the exhaustion of other forms of caregiving while living through a mass death event. But when hiring and pay freezes began, when severance packages were encouraged, and when redundancies started to take place—one article estimates that 3000 university employees in the UK were made redundant between March and September 2020—one had to wonder whether the literature on care within a reparative, worldmaking, or worldbuilding framework addressed the full picture. If care is repetitive and unremarkable, involving a “manifold range of doings needed to create, hold together, and sustain life and continue its diverseness,” as María Puig de la Bellacasa has written, what framework do we have to describe the pattern of an environment that pushes its own care workers out—or that keeps them in a state of suspension and need?[10]

This is a question that feminist critics of precarity and contingent labor have asked before. According to Karen Cardozo, contingent academic labor itself needs to be understood as a form of “care work.”[11] Pointing out that many precarious lecturers are typically paid to “only” teach rather than to do research and participate in other aspects of the profession, she links precarious academic work back to the nineteenth-century division between women’s unpaid “reproductive” work and men’s paid “productive” work. What Cardozo calls the feminized “teaching class” therefore falls under a broader and longer historical context of socially reproductive work that is devalued (Cardozo, “Academic Labor,” 412). Similarly, Robin Zheng has argued that the growth of contingent labor can be traced back historically to “the feminization of labor,” which refers both to the increased numbers of women entering the workforce, and to a structural transformation in which working conditions previously considered feminine work expanded to all workers.[12] So both men and women are increasingly subjected to “the precarious, low-prestige piece-work conditions” long experienced by women (Zheng, “Precarity,” 242). Add to this history the fact that women and faculty of color entered the academy when the trend of casualization was picking up pace; the latter continue to be more likely to hold contingent positions.[13]

With that spate of redundancies during the first year of Covid, the neoliberal university was seeing its own position from the perspective of precarity, of the uncertainty of its own financial future. It sought ways to mitigate this, and this exacerbated the precarity and casualization of those who engage in “care work” from the ground. What happened next after the summer of 2020 will be familiar to those in UK higher education: overall student enrolment in fact increased. This was due to a number of factors, not least the “U-turn” on school exam results that autumn. Because of the pandemic, education authorities had cancelled the exams which would normally help to determine offers of university places for students; Ofqual, the government regulator, developed an algorithm for moderating students’ past academic performance with the historical results at their respective schools, which led to approximately 40% of students having their grades lowered when compared with the grades predicted by their teachers.[14] The U-turn on this policy led to a sudden jump in final grades which led to more university offers being made, and the understaffing and the grading algorithm debacle, combined with the dropping of an existing government cap on student numbers in universities, prompted the emergency creation of fixed-term job posts to handle urgent teaching needs.[15]

Duration and the Meantime

One of the questions my book considers is the affective and political work of a word like “duration.” In high modernism, duration, as durée in Bergsonian thought, tends to refer to individual temporal flux and freedom; by the late thirties, I argue, duration seemed more suggestive of a shrinking of collective temporal horizons as the Second World War looked all but inevitable. Then, towards the end of the Second World War, the idea of “duration” became more open-ended, as many routines that were adopted “for the duration” of hostilities continued for many years with austerity and the conflict’s mutation into the Cold War. There is an inherent plasticity to a word like duration—which suggests both temporal finitude and openness, the idea of a time that will end, but ambiguity about when that will occur—that captures a changing phenomenology and idea of “wartime” at mid-century. Covid is not a war, despite the plethora of problematic conflict metaphors used by many to describe it. But for me, it has occasioned not just a rethinking of priorities, but of the kind of work and motivations that a concept like “duration” can serve, and the consequences after said duration, if that “after” does indeed arrive.

What is the duration of “the meantime”? The “meantime” is the temporality of a holding space, a way of thinking about the present that simultaneously defers its significance to the future, but whose logic in turn justifies the actions undertaken in the present. In Sarah Sharma’s conception, “the meantime” describes how the temporalities of everyday life become deployed as forms of biopolitical control, with institutions of power normalizing people’s experiences of time.[16] The temporal model of labor in the modern university is something akin to “the meantime,” as precarity is a normalizing temporality where staffing needs “in the meantime” create insecure employment that is then often presented as a necessary means for a more secure future. As many know well, the “meantime” of precarity, and the savings this creates for the university, can become an undefined, open-ended duration, with academics hopping from contract to contract for many years without landing a permanent position.

With the Covid-era university, we now have the conjunction of “the meantime(s)” with the “the mean time(s).” I borrow the latter from Paul Cloke, Jon May, and Andrew Williams’ article on the geographies of foodbanks as bringing together the temporality of liminality with the “mean” temporalities of poverty, and the increased need for welfare and social care.[17] The perception of being in the mean time(s), like chronophobia’s dread of the future, structures and changes how we live and experience our present. Universities braced for the mean time(s) as soon as the pandemic began: where institutions were expanding campuses and building new infrastructure, these were suspended; where departments depended on next year’s student numbers to decide their present budget, these were no longer reliable if available. With student enrolment unevenly distributed along socio-economic lines, and with rising fuel prices and a cost-of-living crisis, the mean time(s) continue to be very much on the horizon.

Nevertheless, one could argue that the mean time(s) began before Covid arrived. The pandemic came on the heels of a disruptive year in UK higher education already, with strike action over changes to the universities pension scheme and over broader issues surrounding casualization, workloads, and gender pay gaps which took place just before the first lockdown. And with precarious scholars of color hard hit by the pandemic—not only in terms of job insecurity, but with the additional administrative work surrounding diversity and inclusion, and additional care work for students of color in the racialized politics of the pandemic—whatever “crisis” we currently live in has a long prehistory and a long aftermath impacting on intersectional identities.[18] “The extent to which the pandemic exacted a disproportionate toll on the Black community and Asian communities in Britain highlight[s] the structural inequalities and racism British universities are surrounded by and are sometimes complicit in,” Sarah Crook writes. During the early lockdowns, “[t]hese profound, important issues were a reminder of the world beyond the absorbing minutiae of the intimate and the domestic.”[19]

In late summer of 2023, five international modernist associations collaborated on a nearly two-week long series of events tackling “Difficult Conversations in Modernist Studies,” kicking off with an important acknowledgement and discussion of “precarity inside academia and outside of it.” If, as Adam Barrows puts it in The Cosmic Time of Empire (2010), it is “possible, and productive, to rethink the politics of modernism through the politics of time,” then it seems to me that the field has made way for a conversation about how central debates within modernist time studies—private versus public time, what constitutes the everyday and the event, how the politics of time are felt in embodied, affective ways, and how individual, intimate experiences scale to the social—are intersecting with care in the academy (Barrows, Cosmic, 4). These impact on the very conditions through which we research, teach, and understand the politics of time, and this is a conversation that preceded, and that should, endure past the mean/time(s).