A Culture of Care in Higher Education:Empathy, Affect and COVID-19

COVID-19 is helping us to think differently about the self, others, and the human and more-than-human world around us. This chapter addresses Prompt 6 from the Massive/Microscopic Sensemaking experiment (Markham and Harris, Prompts for making sense of a pandemic: The 21-day autoethnography challenge. Qualitative Inquiry, online first, 1–13 (2020)), which asks “How has COVID made you or someone you know be better than you were?” and “How has the desperation of COVID 19 become a kind of energy that can move things…?”. In particular, we look at how the macro pandemic atmosphere interacts with various microscopic affective encounters to create ecologies of collaboration in which empathies might differently emerge. This chapter draws on a three-way relationship in which Julia, completing her doctoral thesis, and Dan and Elise, supervising the project, come together to explore our different experiences of COVID. Through a series of interwoven autoethnographic narratives, we explore how our ways of teaching, learning and collaborating have been altered as researchers, teachers and student, as well as our affective and empathic engagements with others.