Bringing together researchers from six WUN universities will enable an international analysis of how the current global pandemic is impacting upon the mental health and wellbeing of academics and their students as members of a global HE community.
The research team will generate a data set that explains both trends at individual country and inter-country levels. This data will provide a staging post for generative discussions and potential concrete policy outcomes regarding commonalities and divergences in how academic educators are working (and the impacts on their health and well-being) in different political strategies, schedules, and regional contexts in the specific context of the Covid-19 global pandemic.
The project hopes to shed light on how academics are both drawing upon and are constrained by material resources, physical spaces, online and local communities, digital technologies, time, and their universities.
The study will provide rich material with which to advise and influence the international HE community at all levels: academics and professional services staff; academic and student unions; HE health care workers including student support workers and medical practitioners, and crucially, HE regulators, funders, support organisations and policy makers.
In July 2020 the research team ran an international webinar as a key feedback and dissemination event, to report country-specific as well as global findings.
In the first half of 2021, the group published research findings in the British Journal of Sociology of Education and Irish Educational Studies.
Selected outcomes
Publications (2021)
- The COVID-19 crisis is not the core problem’: experiences, challenges, and concerns of Irish academia during the pandemic published in Irish Educational Studies (May 2021)
- ‘Pandemia’: a reckoning of UK universities’ corporate response to COVID-19 and its academic fallout published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education (July 2021)
