Research and Teaching in a Pandemic World: The Challenges of Establishing Academic Identities During Times of Crisis

This book adopts collaborative autoethnography as its methodology, and presents the collective witnessing of experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic within the higher education sector. Through the presentation of staff and student experiences and what was learnt from them, the authors examine the global phenomenon that is the COVID-19 pandemic through the purposeful exploration of their own experiences. This book presents an overall argument about the state of higher education in the middle of the pandemic and highlights academic issues and region-specific challenges. The reflections presented in this book offer insights for other staff and students, as well as academic policy-makers, regarding the pandemic experiences of those within academia. It also offers practical suggestions as to how we as a global community can move forward post-pandemic.

Dr Basil Cahusac de Caux teaches undergraduate sociology at the American University of the Middle East, Kuwait. He is an expert in East Asian sociolinguistics and is currently researching the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral candidates and early career researchers. Basil is the co-editor of the book ‘Wellbeing in Doctoral Education’ and the author of numerous research articles in the social sciences. 

Dr Lynette Pretorius is an award-winning educator and passionate researcher with more than ten years of experience in the fields of academic language, literacy, research skills, and research methodologies. She works as the Academic Language and Literacy Advisor for the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Australia, teaching undergraduate, postgraduate, and graduate research students. Lynette is the author of multiple journal articles and an academic book focused on the experiences of graduate research students in academia. She has qualifications in Medicine, Science, Education, as well as Counselling, and her research interests include doctoral education, wellbeing, experiential learning, reflective practice, and autoethnography. 

Dr Luke Macaulay is a research fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Refugee Employment, Advocacy, Training, and Education (CREATE), Australia. As an interdisciplinary researcher, Luke has worked in a number of areas, including higher education, educational leadership, inclusive education, refugee and migration studies, as well as cultural studies. Luke’s current research explores cultural experiences of becoming an adult and the social/political belonging of refugee background youth.