The pandemic, race and the crisis of the neoliberal university: study notes from lockdown London
Ashwani SHARMA
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into further crisis the contemporary global university. By focusing on the UK this article examines how this crisis has manifested itself in UK universities, with an increasingly problematic reliance on online teaching and learning. Further, simultaneously universities are being challenged by demands for racial justice and decolonisation following the Black Lives Matter global protests after the police killing of George Floyd. The article argues that the crisis is an opportunity to rework the relationship between pedagogy, technology, race, and cultural studies in local and transnational digital and cultural networks to resist the exploitation of global info-capitalism.
KEYWORDS: Pandemic; COVID-19; race; Black Lives Matter; neoliberalism; university; digital communication; pedagogy, United Kingdom
Notes on contributor
Ashwani Sharma is the Course Leader for BA (Hons) Film and Screen Studies at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He is completing a book Race and Visual Culture in Global Times (Bloomsbury Academic). His research and teaching interests include: audio-visual culture; postcolonial and black culture; digital and urban culture; racial capitalism; global and diasporic film and contemporary art; open access publishing; radical pedagogy. Ashwani is founding co-editor of darkmatter journal http://www.darkmatter101.org and co-editor of Disorienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Music (Zed Books). He writes poetry, has worked in the BBC, and has been an aeronautical engineer.