Inequality in higher education during Covid19

Covid19 has caused one of the major global disruptions in the history of contemporary higher education (HE). Disruptions to the status quo often bring to the fore the degree of commitment which institutions and individuals hold towards principles for the social good, in addition to whether such commitments are positioned as mainstream or marginal to the purposes of HE. This is a global institution rife with inequality, due to its gatekeeping functions—at the apex of educational levels and the de/legitimation of knowledges across the world—and the continuation of its historical collusion with social engineering and stratification. Two dominant conceptions posited to address such inequality are ‘equality’, connoting sameness in treatment by asserting the fundamental equality of all persons, and ‘equity’, considering differential circumstances towards fairness or justice being practiced in the provision of education and other benefits (Espinoza, 2007). Two problematic models premised on equality are meritocracy, a myth of neutral HE systems blind to bias and nepotism where (regardless of their inherited capitals) those individuals with ‘talent’ and ‘grit’ have equal chance to succeed; and social mobility, the belief that HE certification provides access to the fruits of middle/ upper class status and privileges for those hardworking individual entrants from lower socio-economic groups, which are thereby constructed as deficit. Neoliberal conceptions of education are critiqued for individualising responsibility and deficit, for maintaining the status quo of existing structural injustices, and for constructing autonomous individuals without complex, intersecting identities. Alternative concepts construct equity as explicitly concerned with matters of injustice (Pillay & Agherdien, 2021), requiring cognisance of the ethical, historical and socio-economic necessities for social justice, and social and systemic changes as preconditions for the possible future-focus ideal of equality.

Publications engaging with the recent disruptions from Covid19 restrictions reveal global North/South divides in the nature of their social commitments. The Janus face of digital and online modes of education came to the fore: the potential therein for flexible, open, accessible models and the dangers of introducing or exacerbating inequalities and inequities (Naffi et al., 2020). Socio-technological inequalities exacerbate and are exacerbated by other forms of socio-economic, geographical and geopolitical inequalities (Aggarwal et al., 2020). Those in the global North enjoyed 87% online connectivity, compared to 47% in middle-income countries and 19% in low-income contexts (Brooms, 2020). Existing stratifications within countries were revealed too, when only those HE institutions with existing capacity, or the affordance to hire-in necessary human and technology capacity, maintained their educational provision. More prevalently assumed in the global North was that students and staff would have appropriate and readily available access to technology, data, off-campus physical environments and existing digital literacies to engage in teaching-and-learning practices online. Indications were that support was initially provided ad hoc and agentially through academic and support staff (Inside Higher Ed in Naffi et al., 2020), leading in some cases to short-term institutional adjustments through buy-in schemes for devices, technologies and technologists as necessary. A self-reported survey of student services administered within 70 countries indicated that students were provided with access to increased internet bandwidth, laptop rentals, free devices and data (Luescher & Schreiber, 2020). Concerns were raised that this was often without the necessary criticality to mitigate the dangers of speedy adoptions of existing digital technologies (for example, see Naffi et al., 2020) nor about the impacts on learning engagement. Early scholarly writing highlighted insufficient consideration of the conditions of flexible learning modes and student preparedness, where ‘to succeed in flexible learning, one must be autonomous, independent, and with the ability to self-regulate’ (Houlden & Veletsianos, 2021, p. 149). Arguments were made that this was the ‘insidious promotion of capitalist individualism’ (ibid.), which obscured how institutions may then lay the blame on those who do not fit the mould for their own disposability.

Scholarly interest on the impact of Covid19 on HE exploded early on (Selwyn & Jandrić, 2020). In our review of such literature, we noticed that equity lenses were less prevalent during that period in the global North than in what emerged from the global South. Of the former, equality foci were more prevalent, such as that about women in various contexts (Malisch et al., 2020; Oleschuk, 2020), African Americans in the USA (Harper, 2020; Wright & Merritt, 2020) and implications for rural locations (Brotherhood et al., 2020). Students and staff falling within these marginalised categories were disproportionately affected, as were those whose reliance was on resources accessible on campus and in residences (Belluigi et al., 2020) including international students (Peters et al., 2020). The positioning within practitioner discourses, of socio-economic barriers as marginal concerns in high participation contexts in the global North, was misrepresentative. A sizeable portion of the HE community was affected, with reporting emerging in the USA, for instance, that over 20% of students were ‘missing in action’ from their registered courses due to various insecurities (Sawchuk & Samuels, 2020) and over 60% Black and Latinx students, and students with a reported household income of less than $50,000, experienced significant technological challenges to access (Parker et al., 2021). In the UK, researchers raised concerns early on that digital divides would impact on existing divides within the educational life course, citizenship and intergenerationally (Aggarwal et al., 2020). In Australia, researchers have pointed to the full complexity of impacts on the student life cycle (O’Shea et al., 2021). Global informational capitalism, which over two decades ago, was ‘characterized by a tendency towards increased social inequality and polarization’ (Castells, 2000, p. 380) and has become entrenched in the ensuing decades, intensified during the pandemic.

With fewer published academic studies from the global South to draw from at the time of writing, indications in the press (Ndzinisa & Dlamini, 2022) and in practitioner communities were that halting, cautious and uneven approaches were more often taken to the adoption of online education. National-level considerations of access in contexts with low participation rates continued to have considerable political salience. Some countries closed educational institutions for a period of time (such as Kenya and Angola), while others explored ‘low tech’ solutions, such as radio which was utilised in two thirds of low-income countries and less than half upper-middle-income countries (Tawil, 2020), and paper-based options (Czerniewicz et al., 2020). Advocacy discourses of online learning masked the digital divide between and within countries. For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa, ‘89% of learners do not have access to household computers and 82% lack internet access’ and over half reside in locations outside of mobile networks (International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, 2020). A survey in April 2020 of 501 early career researchers from across the African continent found over 80% experienced interruptions to the curricula, and fewer than half were offered ‘emergency remote teaching and learning’ (ERTL) by their institutions (Mazawo Institute, 2020). Researchers pointed to the socio-cultural barriers to digital equity:

Inequities in access to online learning platforms and software are compounded by differences in cultural capital. Rich parents generally have the knowledge, competence, resources and skills to support online and home learning. Online learning also requires active mediation of learning, which is disproportionately unequal between rich and impoverished households. (Sayed & Singh, 2020, p. 29)

In countries such as South Africa, which foregrounds equity and access as mainstream goals of its national development plans and education-specific policies (Council on Higher Education, 2004), equity discourses featured prominently in governmental responses to restrictions. National and institutional funding initiatives were implemented early on to support students to access technology, both devices and data, including providing internet access (‘zero rating’) for educational sites under certain conditions. Some institutions utilised active data gathering from student surveys and online analytics, from which strategies were revised at both the micro-level of individual academics’ curricula and meso-plans of institutions (Motala & Menon, 2020). What became more visible were differential impacts in relation to students’ socio-economic conditions. These mirrored many Covid19-related concerns on other parts of the African continent, where

[w]hat we face are the defining human rights issues of this era: deepening inequalities, pervasive and expanding poverty, racism, sexism and gender oppression, the democratic governance predicament and the climate crisis. (Dersso, 2020)

Unsurprisingly, some of the earliest calls for academic engagement about equity came from contexts where equity was an already prominent feature of HE discourses. This included a special issue of a journal encouraging practitioners to reflect on how ‘Covid19 pandemic simultaneously engages, intensifies and subverts existing educational inequity and iniquity’ (Fataar & Badroodien, 2020, p. 1). Researchers from the global South have since drawn attention to various concerns, from the ways in which ERTL is entangled within socio-material affordances of institutions (Gunter et al., 2020), through to how individual and familial conceptions of the common good have impacted regional HE sectors during the pandemic (Azman et al., 2020).

Recognising the politicisation of internationalisation discourses in HE, we hope to contribute to the broader research agenda of critical Higher Education Studies which ‘draws attention to the very different functions of HE depending on the socio-historical context’ (Hartmann, 2010, p. 169). We do so through an analysis of the insider discourses within South Africa and the UK which were drawn upon to comprehend, frame and respond to the Covid19 crises.

Academic development: identity, agency and discourse

Academic development (AD) in both the global North and South has been largely generative in HE, by playing ‘a significant role in creating university “learning and teaching” as an object of policy scrutiny and intervention’ (Clegg, 2009) within the wider HE ecology ‘comprising [of] myriad service providers, instructional and administrative labour, funders and regulators interacting in a messy system of educational production’ (Kirst & Stevens, 2015). However, critique of ‘constituting teaching and learning as its object’ has included that ‘other more radical, feminist and critical pedagogies, which are capable of dealing with the power and curricula, were marginalised’ (Clegg, 2009). This has led to concerns that AD may serve the interests of professional socialisation rather than institutional change (Belluigi & Thondhlana, 2019). This is relevant because, while the field of AD is not our focus, the conditions for the agency of those who operate within its fields and communities (including ‘educational technologists’) are important for the equity agenda of HE. Complexities emerge in their identities, with many seeing themselves as ‘border intellectuals within the university… whose scholarship [or practice] seeks to explicitly challenge longstanding structural inequalities and social exclusions’ (Darder, 2012, p. 412). The moral and ethical commitments of individuals within this field, not least of which relate to equity, may or may not align with that of their institutional or national discourses, or even that of their own communities of practice. For this, the concepts of ‘discursive positions’ and ‘discourse conflict’ are useful for comprehending the commitments and identities which motivates these agents, in addition to how the locus of responsibility is constructed and positioned in relation to questions of equity during the early stages of the pandemic.

Within academia—through spoken, written and embodied discourse—an agent’s identity is recognised by a particular community as they engage in an activity, what Gee (2005) describes as the ‘identity work’ within subjection. Subjectification is understood here as the act of subjectifying where the self is constructed, rather than discovered or developed. The conditions of subjectification are in part structured through interpretative frameworks or metanarratives. Insights into such metanarratives are provided by discourses which do not represent but rather order the world through policing and disciplining meaning (Foucault, 1972), establishing norms which are then enacted as languages, forms, procedures and systems that validate certain criteria over others for judgement. In the interplay of discourses, identities function as ‘points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us’ (Hall, 2000, p. 19). The person in HE, choosing to learn/teach/research/manage/support/lead, finds their notion of the self partially decentred and constituted within contextual discourses which make them in/visible as a ‘student’, ‘teacher’, ‘academic’, ‘support staff’, ‘leader’, etc. Foucault’s work shows how discourses command subjective investments that do not have to be coercive. In HE, discursive formation of subject positions may happen overtly and explicitly through certification and legitimation processes. However, the ‘person’ is never fully decontextualized as an autonomous figure within such social institutions where their associated social markers, of identity or of difference, are mis/recognised or de/legitimised through the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006) related to group membership and geocultural impositions within the sector. Concerned with how agents are able to resist the conditions which work to dull their capacity as thinking and discerning subjects into passivity or submission, this socio-cultural approach conceives of human subjects as psychosocial, and of discourses as products of culture. Higher education is embroiled in re/producing the conditions and discourses of the Culture Industry which, broadened from the initial formulations of the Frankfurt School, is a term that includes economic relations and information society (Castells, 1999) which are important considerations in light of relation of the ‘pivot online’.

How members of academic communities ‘experiences with and on the participatory web inform a new habitus which is at odds with a habitus that is traditionally expected in academia’ (Costa, 2015) has long been a scholarly interest in ‘educational technology’ communities. To differentiate between carefully planned, designed and informed ‘online education’ from the often more haphazard practices which emerged during the early stages of ‘pivot online’, the term ‘emergency remote teaching and learning’ (ERTL) was coined (Peters et al., 2020). A number of such scholars observed how online academic practices often mirrored the long-critiqued talk-and-chalk traditions of analogue ‘teaching’, with synchronous communication tools (such as Zoom) and online platforms at times mis-utilised for ‘delivering’ ‘content’ to student-consumers (Hodges et al., 2020; Manfuso, 2020; Peters et al., 2020). Some reported how re-assertions of arguments for sustainable and holistic assessment practices (Veletsianos & Houlden, 2020), and rare reports of cases of institutional flexibility and accommodation in assessment requirements (Hodges et al., 2020), were drowned out due to the anxieties of the quality assurance of online assessments, plagiarism and cheating. These new HE landscapes led scholar-practitioners to raise alarms about accessibility, data privacy and ownership (such as the Zoom controversy, see Selwyn & Jandrić, 2020), particularly when institutions explored costly proctoring tools without grappling explicitly with privacy (Brotherhood et al., 2020), surveillance (Veletsianos & Houlden, 2020) and engendering distrust (Ross & Macleod, 2020).

Schisms were notable in the orientations of practitioners, scholars and researchers in this field. Some recoiled from ‘flexible digital education deployed in haste’ (Veletsianos & Houlden, 2020, p. 851), while others critiqued their peers for opportunism:

‘never waste a crisis’ became a sort of refrain in many ed-tech circles; the pandemic was an excuse to implement bolder changes than would be possible absent the emergency context. (Tawil, 2020, p. 2)

This argument was used by both those who were techno-solutionists and those who saw the crisis as an opportunity for progressive social change.

Asserted anew, against an historic backdrop of increasingly underfunding of public HE, were funding deliberations. Amidst budget cuts and financial constraints from reductions in student-related income (especially the migrant student ‘market’ in many universities in the global North), there were re-assertions of quality-versus-cost debates of campus-based models of education (Damm, 2020; Stevens, 2020). Fears of encroaching massive, global universities (Hobson & Hagan, 2020) were voiced by those observing strategic partnerships with private institutions and edtech companies (Walsh, 2020). At these preliminary stages, scholars actively shared their observations of the shape and implications of massively increased private investments in HE (Williamson & Hogan, 2021), with some choosing to focus on the equity implications for and within the sector (Ivancheva et al., 2020).

Methodological notes

Our intention in this study was to consider the discourse conflicts and positioning of AD scholar-practitioners, ourselves included, which were negotiated in the early stages of Covid19 restrictions, and in what ways they revealed the conditions of subjectification within HE contexts. While heterogeneous in our disciplinary backgrounds, communities of practice, professional and social positioning and privileges, as authors we share the desire to understand and explore the complexities of the colonial condition and its legacies within HE (including those of internal colonialism, settler colonialism, apartheid and neoliberalism).

The study is characterised by intertextual insights into how key insiders re/negotiated the social practices of HE during the early pandemic period in the contexts of South Africa (SA) and United Kingdom (UK). It draws from written reflections which were composed by individuals between March and May 2020 in response to a set of loosely framed prompts (shown in Fig. 1). These were framed by two of the authors of this paper (DZB and LC) and shared across their networks for snowball sampling, for the explicitly-stated purpose of sharing insider reflections within scholarly publications.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Prompts for contributors’ responses shared in the period from May to June 2020

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These narratives were then drawn upon for two papers published in 2020: Belluigi et al. (2020) (henceforth referred to as Paper 1) offering ‘key assertions’ during that ‘pivotal moment’ from contributors who were based within 18 HE institutions in 7 countries, including South Africa and the UK; and Czerniewicz et al. (2020) (henceforth referred to as Paper 2) specifically about South Africa, with contributions by insiders from 15 of the 26 public HE institutions. In each of those two papers, those who contributed narratives were invited to act as co-authors and to be attributed, with most electing to do so. For this paper’s analysis, undertaken at a later point in the pandemic, we as co-authors have drawn explicitly on our six full narratives as primary data, and the excerpts of the narratives of the SA- and UK-based contributors which were cited within the two published papers, of which we were contributing authors. Illustrative excerpts from these eight sources are indicated within the ‘Analysis and discussion’ section below. This approach enabled us to interact intensively as a smaller team of 3 SA-based and 3 UK-based academics, recognising that the initial insights were narrated by individuals and then interwoven collectively within the published papers as reflection-in-action (Schon, 1983), and that there is value to critically analysing anew such negotiation of discourses and subjectivities as a reflection outside-of-action (Usher & Johnston, 1997).

Without assuming that context determines our experiences as practitioners and our experiences as scholars, we have sought to comprehend how context situates them. The reflective narratives we have drawn upon for this paper were composed by insiders who have occupied (and studied) various professional roles within higher education and who were situated within different types of higher education institutions which were based within 7 of the 9 provinces of South Africa (namely, Eastern Cape, Free State, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Northern Cape, North West, Western Cape) or 3 of the 4 regions of the UK (namely, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales). Thus, while terms such as Global South/ North within the review above necessarily indicate the larger geopolitical and geocultural dynamics at play, within the analysis section we have been careful to delineate the locatedness of the UK or SA insights when they seemed particular to that context, while not asserting these are representative of the entirety of that sector.

Informed by the theoretical orientation outlined in the section above, within the paper we have sought to make explicit the discourses which exert power, often implicitly and insidiously, in our HE communities. We adopted what is widely referred to as Foucauldian critical discourse analysis (CDA), although we prefer to acknowledge the many traditions that similarly read ‘against the grain’ of representation, including the work of feminist, postcolonialist and critical race scholars interested in challenging the relations and re/productions of power in social and epistemic practices (Van Dijk, 2001; Wodak, 1995). Through CDA, we explored the socio-culturally constructed nature (Fish, 1980) of the texts, probing the discourses present, negotiated, shaped and resisted by ourselves and our peers as narrators who composed the reflective texts. Deliberate mis-reading of entangled rhetorical power-plays offered us opportunities for comprehension, reflection and critique of the entangled communities and interests in which we are situated. We distinguished ‘discourses’, as broader signifiers of commonly held notions and norms, from ‘acts of narration’ as embodied social practices (Day Sclater, 2003) composed by ourselves and our peers as intentional agents and ‘narrators’ (the term we utilise in this paper). However, in our analysis we focused on the relations between those discourses and acts, to question the taken-for-grantedness of agency and to grapple with the conditions of its possibility (Butler, 1992) within the various contexts we as narrators were situated during the time frame of the early Covid19 crisis.

Analysis and discussion

When exploring our six reflective texts and the direct quotes within the two published papers, three significant discourse conflicts emerged from those narratives which have structured this ‘Analysis and discussion’ section. These were (i) substratal fault lines; (ii) intersections with digital divides; and (iii) in/visibility of differentially impacted individuals and groups.

Fault lines

Within this section, we discuss how the analysis revealed the ways in which existing fault lines were exposed and amplified during this early period, which seemed less anticipated by the academic communities of the narrators based in the UK than in SA. In the face of such exposure, some members of academic communities expressed helplessness and frustration at their seemingly lack of agency, while others exhibited less consciousness about the inequalities in their midst. Discourses of equity revealed clashes in the constructions of equity held by the different players within the HE ecology, at times differentiated by the ways in which they positioned their roles, responsibilities and commitments.

Our analysis of the narratives confirmed Aggarwal et al.’s (2020) concerns of structural injustices and inequalities at institutional, geographic and geopolitical levels. Narrators were vigilant about the possibility that ‘pre-existing differences (deprivation, disability and disadvantage/advantage) may become more pronounced’, which many felt a responsibility to ward against. Across contexts was a sense of dis-ease expressed by the narrators about the selective operationalising of that which had the potential to address equity. To some, the drive to maintain economic and social interactions threatened a predominate focus on bridging digital divides (as we outline in the ‘Complexities at the intersections of digital divides’ section), despite the absence of campus-based affordance and increased burdens from the domestic domain. Less observed were discussions about inequalities and differential impacts, except for those identified by legislation and policy as ‘targets’ for attention and care (as we discuss in the ‘In/visible differential impacts’ section ). However, also across contexts, narrators noticed ‘growing awareness and acknowledgement that geographical… factors matter in higher education’. This was even the case in a UK institution where the dominant in-group seemed to believe ‘the West is the world’.

Perhaps because equity is ‘normalised as a principle within South African curriculum discourses, in an attempt to redress the colonial and apartheid education legacies’ (Paper 1, n.p.), narrative-discourse alignment about historical divisions, oppression or ignorance was most notably prevalent within SA-based narratives. A contributor to Paper 2 (p. 949) wrote that HE responses in the country ‘revealed historic (and mostly forgotten) fault lines’ with ‘tectonic layers pushing and shoving against one another, tectonic layers of intergenerational inequalities, unheard and ignored for too long’. These related to the racialized immiseration and impoverishment of the population from colonialism, apartheid, cold war and continuing neoliberal geopolitics. Many expressed concerns about those inequalities being exacerbated in that already stratified HE national sector, as was alluded to in this co-author’s narrative.

At an institutional and sectoral level, there is a danger that the sector will become even more differentiated and that the traditional research-intensive universities will be the ones which survive and others will painfully and slowly land up closing. This will be to the serious detriment of the students they serve. [emphasis added]

Equity was recognised as ‘a “hypersensitive” discourse in “historically disadvantaged institutions” because our students are not as well-resourced as others’, as one SA-based narrator described it. At the time of the restrictions (and again at the time of writing this paper a year later), many institutions had ‘already been closed before the lockdown because of student protest’ about barriers to access from tuition fees. Endemic economic inequalities cut across the SA academic community, where the reality was ‘if our staff has issues engaging, what about our students?’ Passive wording in the narratives, such as those italicised in the indented excerpt below, evoked the lack of agency of those most ‘at risk’ to the socio-economic realities which were exacerbated by the displacement from campus affordances and the introduction of ERTL.

The most vulnerable students may well fall out of the sector entirely, as they have become invisible and have simply dropped off the radar. [emphasis added]

The narratives of those UK-based described discourse conflicts with the metanarratives of equality within their institutions. For instance one wrote that.

[This is a] highly corporate and competitive environment. So ‘equality’ translates to women’s representation, salary and labour as a HR issue only, with much effort going into satisfying the minimum compliance for awards or looking into intersectionality. Similarly, equality training is about an online course in ‘unconscious bias’… Meritocracy [is] not even in question – so this institution was not to my mind anywhere near comprehending the beginnings of equity.

Most narrators across contexts ruminated on the potential for discourses of equity to be rethought, reframed and redefined as awareness grew across the ecology: ‘Equity is achieving a prominence it never had before, and starting to be taken seriously by people who were never really part of the conversation’. The tone of the SA paper, for instance, was imbued with the hope of communities of practice dedicated to addressing inequalities:

While our inboxes and social networks, there is an expressed hope that, somehow, this ‘wake-up’ call will result, post-pandemic, in reshaping the intersections of equity, inequality and teaching online for the better. (Paper 2, p. 947)

However, narrators also chose to describe the many incidents where their colleagues were characterised as seemingly not able to grasp the implications for inequality of their preferences, such as when one UK-based narrator highlighted ‘I have to say words to the effect of “but what you are proposing to do will exclude some of your students” to blank looks of zero understanding almost every day’. In such excerpts, when characterising their practitioner roles and responsibilities, narrators identified agentic spaces in which they were able to insert their critical knowledge to affect the discourses and impact on equity approaches taken. Asserting the generative potential of the moment, one explained ‘we have been gifted a unique opportunity to queer HE on an unprecedented scale. I feel morally obliged to seize it’. This potential was often offset by the limits of their own agency, and that of their peers and institutions. Others expressed disappointment that the ‘intrinsic drive’ for their fellow educators to innovate to address challenges, which emerged when required during the early stages, ‘is not always prevalent during the “norm”’ (Paper 2, p. 955).

The narratives provide snapshots of the unexpected turns and twists in what inequalities were made in/visible within the discourses in their institutions, and of disjunctions to where the loci of responsibility were placed to address inequalities. Whether responsibility should be exercised at a state, sectoral or institutional level was posed within the SA paper (Paper 2). Narrators from that context described their own expectations about who should have taken a leading role.

I was also surprised by the lack of national guidance for higher education. All institutions had to engage with similar questions, prepare similar strategies, develop similar resources. From a staff perspective (without insight into management deliberations), there was little concerted effort [at co-ordination].

Some of the SA narrators highlighted impactful national-level changes, such as the leading roles of oversight regulatory agencies in cutting through the legislative red-tape which prior to the pandemic ‘had been a bureaucratic hurdle of note’ for online education. Such change brought measured optimism of ‘an opportunity now for regulatory bodies to develop alternative and more flexible frameworks regarding blended forms of provision’. Others expressed concern about the lack of governmental oversight and institutional criticality about the risks of digital capitalism. Narrators expressed suspicions that behind-the-scenes motives were at play. ‘The complete lack of consideration of that option [not going online] was interesting’ in a national context where procuring high-level learning management software (LMS) was not fit-for-purpose of the student majority in non-electrified off-campus environments without the means to access high cost data (Paper 2).

Across both UK and SA contexts, collusion with global capitalism was asserted by narrators as a threat to public HE, leading to ‘increased marketisation as governments and universities turn to the private sector’ whose ‘motivation is profit making at all costs no matter what the sales pitch’. In addition to casting institutions as failing in their ethical responsibilities for data privacy, questions were posed about the burden of the ‘huge cost implications for the institution, which were not budgeted for as the implementation of various ICT projects’ (Paper 2, p. 962). Writing about a UK institution, one narrator felt that ‘equity is only accommodated when there is much £££££ aka the “business case” to financially support initiatives’. Cross cutting were experiences of the tension of being ‘in service’ to the institution or to equity, and that at times these were at odds.

When analysing the reflections, we noticed that narrators mostly characterised themselves as wisened knowers of a longer historical dialogue about HE’s relation to equity. At times, they positioned themselves against new entrants to the dialogue, with in-and-out group positioning prevalent. For instance, a narrator within a UK context noted shifts in interest ‘by people who were never really part of the conversation’, writing that the AD practitioner community were ‘starting to be taken seriously’. Another illustrative excerpt is included below, where a SA-based narrator expressed some distance from, and suspicion about, the prior ignorance and allegiances of their colleagues, writing that.

in/equity issues have been with us [for] as long as I can remember so now everyone understands what we mean by inequality. Those who have been pretending not to know and those who really didn’t know. (Paper 2, p. 949)

In some cases, narrators positioned themselves as distinct from those in leadership (or ‘management’ or ‘the university’). In such cases, these were insiders seemingly most distrustful of their institutions’ commitments to equity. Those within the UK billed progressive actions as part of ‘a PR exercise’, while those who were SA-based seemed to identify more with the political acumen of critical students. One of the latter wrote that trust related to uptake of ERTL because ‘where students have doubts about the commitment [to addressing inequities], they are likely to oppose remote online learning as a solution to the problems caused by the pandemic’ (Paper 2, p. 951). Others pointed to the tricky, political conditions of institution decision-making around access, with one describing how their institution had ‘played it very safe’. Institutional responsibility for maintaining communications and including staff democratically in decision-making processes was another area where ‘frustration for staff and students result from not feeling “in the loop”, waiting for guidance, feeling at a loss’.

Narrators shared how recognition of the responsibility of those with more digital capacity, such as educational technologists, led to productive blurring of traditional roles between members of the academic community as they grappled with steep learning curves. This extended to teacher-student relations, as indicated in the illustrative excerpt below.

[Academics had to] make themselves as vulnerable as their students, admitting they need help. They can’t just rely on ‘but that’s how we do it here’. There has been a shift that has deeply and deliciously unsettled power relations.

Some narrators were angered by the indications that their labour would be, once again, eclipsed by academic staff and their expertise undermined institutionally.

Are we even aware how much our positions have shifted as a result of ERTL?… lecturers get some recognition for the burden of shifting online, but truly, it is the invisible administrative staff who are keeping the ship afloat. (Paper 1, n.p.)

In some of the SA-based narratives, there was surprise expressed that ‘students and beyond looked to institutions to provide solutions rather than the government’. Others expressed unease in the students’ placement of responsibility on institutions and the state to ‘make a plan’, asserting that this led to a self-positioning of students as ‘dependents’.

This made me think—how do students then understand the purpose of the university and what they are required to provide for all students? In particular, we have observed how students have turned to the university expecting support: it is been surprising to me to see the dependency students have on institutions and also the expectations they have of institutions. (Paper 2, p. 962)

Parents and non-academic communities of economically disenfranchised students sharing responsibility for access were constructed by a number of the SA narrators in Paper 2 as positive solutions. Anecdotal stories were shared of impoverished groups negotiating basic infrastructural barriers that had not been addressed by the public sector, such as internet access in rural areas, to illustrate such actions. Perhaps unconscious of the implications of such constructions of distributed responsibility, they nonetheless indicated awareness of the dire nature of such conditions revealed by students who intimated that ‘under no circumstances should a laptop be delivered as it will be sold to put food on the table’ (Paper 1, n.p.). In our analysis, we found that narrators often humanised issues within their narratives, by presenting stories of the difficulties individuals were facing and how pragmatically they were being negotiated. In some cases, this was to express a sense of being moved affectively by what they heard or to express empathy with the plight of the person or group; in other cases, it was to express a sense of incredulity, moral outrage, trauma or horror at the abject nature of what they witnessed.

this experience has emphasised those circumstances and surfaced just how little we can provide in that regard while at the same time being very aware that the academic project needs to continue. (Paper 2, p. 961)

SA-based narrators’ validation of resilient, make-do approaches (as in the Afrikaans term maak a plan) and wherewithal was alluded to in relation to staff actions in their professional roles and how they informally addressed the inequalities of their counterparts.

Not all staff have unlimited wifi at their disposal, nor the kind of connectivity one needs to engage in these synchronous engagements. I was told that staff is sending each other data, so they can attend departmental or faculty meetings.Footnote 1

It is also possible that such rhetorical devices and vignettes may have proved to have strategic capital in discussions with dominant in-groups, and useful both for conscientisation and persuasion in their roles as academic developers mediating the systems and actors engaged with the ‘pivots’ to access learning. They were in key position to observe and hear about challenges faced by those most ‘at risk’, in addition to attempting to influence the agents and systems that had the power to effect changes.

Complexities at the intersections of digital divides

Common across the UK- and SA-based narratives was a characterisation of digital divides widening for both staff and students due to Covid19 restrictions. Similar statements to this one were found in many of the narratives:

Many students have financial constraints that threaten academic continuity… Student barriers to online engagement and interaction ranged from psycho-socio-economic-structural to pedagogical.

All posited matters of equity as of primary concern to the educational function of HE. As such, discourse conflicts emerged within the educational communities of practice institutionally, where narrators held that ‘the biggest barriers are unconsidered mind sets’ of their peers, many of whom held ‘assumptions about access and accessibility, expanding digital divides’.

Many SA-based narrators indicated alignment with positive discourses of that national sector’s ‘multimodal approach’ (Nzimande, 2020) to access. The variety of low and high tech options was described as allowing ‘course content to be highly accessible’ (Paper 2, p. 953) and enabling ‘students to choose that which is most conducive to learning within their context’ (ibid.). Some were cautious, pointing to how ‘it is unknown whether these attempts have been effective and for whom’ (ibid). Others were critical that ‘barriers remain, despite the many gains made in terms of “saving the academic year”’.

Concerns about the quality of academics’ digital competency were expressed. Curriculum design was described as an active terrain of engagement across contexts and institutions, though the degree of whether equity was a peripheral or mainstream concern within design differed. For one SA-based contributor, the dire nature of socio-economic divides which intersected with digital divides had shattered prior ‘illusions’ of equity.

The lockdown has forced us to look much closer to where our students are - where they are positioned - what resources they have - what opportunities to engage in teaching and learning. And we can’t unsee these differences - whether on or off campus.

All the UK-based contributors were concerned that the promotional discourse and optics of access, through the potential of such approaches of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the merits of access to materials, may seem to address inequalities, but that ‘the hidden curriculum and issues of epistemological access could continue as the quiet and undisturbed background track, never mind loudly they sang in the psychological spaces that students occupy’. One narrator at a UK-based institution outlined how the mainstream gaze seemed to widen, but to a limited extent:

It is the ‘how’ of design that is the focus on much of the work being undertaken in UK HEIs as they seek to create suitable and accessible learning provision for students who are used to face-to-face provision. Discussions about digital poverty, the need for greater asynchronous activity to enable participants to engage around other responsibilities, and possible co-creation of knowledge are moving from the periphery to mainstream sector concerns. There is less discussion on how this move, prompted by the Covid19 crisis, can widen participation especially of hard to reach groups.

Narrators from UK contexts were most assertive in expressing discourse conflicts with what they saw as the privileging of economic and social transactions within mainstream curricula offerings in their contexts, perhaps due to the dominance of neoliberal economic ‘rationality’ within that sector.

Strong deficit discourses [are] used when it comes to equality (not even equity), notions of innate intelligence, strong adherence to exclusionary and colonial notions of ‘university material’, disdain for those rural etc., which is only compromised or accommodated when there is much £££££.

Cross cutting was many narrators’ discomfort with the uncritical interweaving of socio-economic transactions into curriculum design choices, made by both institutional complicity to digital capitalismFootnote 2 and by blindness of individual academics, such as the inclusion of group work as a proxy for team skill development or the use of machinery or technologies as a form of apprenticeship training. Such academic choices contribute to the creation of student pedagogic identities that are linked inextricably to their likely economic contribution (Bernstein, 2000). Discomfort with constructions of the HE student, which rest in binaries of ideal and deficit (Bourdieu, 1977), was revealed within the narratives. Speaking about how many who are not neurotypical are cast as deficit within curricula constraints, a contributor based in the UK articulated that.

The view of what constitutes a ‘good student’ and its corresponding ‘student learning journey’… enables students lucky enough to navigate, or sense what the additional curriculum means or offers, easier success in the explicit curriculum. Those who do not, however, are more likely to fail.

There were indications that the online environment, particularly through UDL, had promise for addressing some disparities.

In and of itself the move away from campus is likely to suit autistic students. The home environment is often a safe space enabling autistic people to act authentically without the need to mask. Whilst synchronous activity is still likely to be part of the learning offering it is likely to be more manageable. The ability to turning off the video cam or writing in the text box rather than speaking can be very freeing, no need to mask if you are not being seen.

However, the narrators mostly utilised their reflections to voice cautions about blanket claims asserted in the promotional discourses emerging at that time.

… no-detriment policies which will allegedly ensure that no student is at a disadvantage as a result of Covid19… might pull on the ‘good student’ model… evidenced through embodied actions… some autistic students might be subject to what can be seen as a double discrimination. Not only are they being measured up against an exclusionary model of acceptable behaviours, but many will not hold an ISP [‘Individualized Services/support Plan’ which is provided after recognised official diagnoses] because of being autistic (a diagnosis that is difficult to get if females and/or from BAME communities).

Those already cognisant of how the online learning environment favours those with certain capitals (as noted in the introduction to this article) pointed to how such assumptions were further complicated by the additional stresses that the pandemic and being off campus brought to students.

it is expected of students to participate virtually in all learning tasks during an uncertain time period. It became obvious that the acquisition of such skills is difficult to fully pursue when one is already under pressure and [has] a sense of stress and uncertainty. (Paper 2, p. 956)

It is to these complications of intersecting differential impacts that we turn in the ‘In/visible differential impacts’ section below. However, it bears discussing here that intersecting with the lack of capacity for critical digital pedagogy and for addressing various digital divides were re-assertions of well-known problematic teaching-and-learning practices in the rush to ‘pivot online’. A UK-based narrator noted the hierarchical prestige of ‘Content is King’ and ‘the privileged status of the lecture and the exam’ were protected by ‘trying to replicate those online and thereby perpetuating existing structures, positions of power’. As was the case prior to the pandemic, practitioner attention was critiqued by some narrators for being focussed on assessment rather than concerns of learning engagement. Conditions for this were asserted in some institutions by regulatory quality assurance discourses, which were characterised as an ‘ossification of obstructive, formulaic administrative gatekeeping’ of the AD communities’ prior attempts at online education approaches to equity. A UK-based narrator utilised evocative associations to articulate their frustrations with reproductions of past traditions.

Someone said to me, tradition is peer pressure from dead people, and I added “or the living dead”. Now we are forced to confront the consequences of having pandered to received wisdom, of the “having no time to change” argument, of zombie teaching.

Similarly, an SA-based narrator observed that where

hegemonic understandings dominate… moving bad teaching online creates a bigger threat to the success of these students who are not supported in elitist cultures with unequal power relations. Bad teaching perpetuates inequality. (Paper 2, p. 959)

The unsettling of teacher-student roles within such dynamics was however constructed as potentially generative, even at this early stage, across contexts.

The notion of what constitutes teaching and learning spaces has been blown out of the water. And along with it the idea of the lecture. Lecturers are having to (re)consider their roles as teachers; what it means to teach; or in some instances being forced to consider for the first time what it means to teach, or to learn. What it means to be a student, to have to learn to be a teacher.

Thus, the narratives indicated that while digital divides were to be analysed in their own right, they were very much entangled with intersecting divides.

In/visible differential impacts

The narrators all discussed concerns, observations and anecdotes of who and what was appearing within the periphery of, or had been made invisible within, the mainstream gaze.

One growing recognition was of the burdens of caring responsibilities that were experienced by many students and staff when working from home resulted in changes in curriculum design, with content-heavy lectures being replaced by alternative modes of learning/teaching. However, inequity beyond the campus space began to be writ large in the lived experience of the restrictions when domestic and academic domains were brought into proximity. The complications of ‘space’ was a central topic of the text about international contexts, Paper 1, including the differential impacts of the non-campus, non-residential space of ‘home’ for students and staff. Paper 2 (p. 957) highlighted how SA residential accommodation on campus acts ‘a refuge for those coming from abusive/dysfunctional homes - physical emotional and verbal abuse/gender-based violence’.

With a predominantly young population, because they were no longer within the relative privileges of the residential system, many students in South Africa were found to be shouldering ‘more family responsibilities like running errands, household chores, taking care of elderly family members’ (Paper 2, p. 957) when learning from their domestic base. Early on in the UK, such complications were raised more in relation to those staff or mature learners with caring responsibilities who, primarily due to restrictions, no longer had recourse to avail of social and care services provided in that high income context. What cut across both contexts was the gendered nature of care, with more burdens on female students and staff.

Caregiving for children or elders or others is still overwhelmingly a female responsibility. The closure of schools and universities means that female staff and students have a disproportionate amount of their time and energy being taken up with caregiving (Paper 1, n.p.).

Under these circumstances, narrators observed how women academics particularly expressed being impacted adversely by the continuing misogynist HE work cultures where

the competitive and precarious work environment have created the conditions where, despite the messages of wellness and work-life-balance, the fear of being axed because of a lack of performance, has many staff operating at the now more-than-full capacity.

This was a common cross-cutting complaint. Perhaps due to the deficit of equity considerations for HE staff, solutions to address this systemically were not on the horizon within larger practitioner nor policy discourses at that early stage. Research about the impact on the productivity levels of academic staff was however an area of research in that period (Squazzoni et al., 2020).

Inconsistences arose within the narratives about which groups and inequalities were positioned as key foci within practitioner discourses, even within national contexts. Prior to the pandemic, in the UK there had been a recognition that certain groups and communities were less well served, and were subject to additional barriers that restrained their success. The associated ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’ discourses and policies focused on those with the ‘protected characteristics’ cited in the equality acts of their countries, such as so-called Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic participants (BAME) and those disabled. A narrator noted that interaction with individuals from such groups previously took place ‘in the physical space of the uni, [where] differences are glossed over by providing physical access (e.g. lifts in buildings), additional requirement declarations (e.g. extra time in examinations, assistive technologies), open computer labs and on-site unlimited internet access, printing facilities, pastoral care, etc’. Another UK-based narrator highlighted in their narrative that the needs of many disabled and neuro-divergent students, even though supposedly protected by equality regulation, had not been given sufficiently attention prior to the restrictions, echoing many studies in this area (Clouder et al., 2020). That narrator ascribed this in part to unchallenged staff expectations, which were.

drawn from a neuro-typical view of what constitutes a ‘good student’… where in order to meet these expectations - or at the very least not to stand out too much, autistic students are very likely to seek to ‘mask’ their autistic selves requiring heightened physiological and psychological labour.

One UK-based narrator expressed concern that their institution seemed ‘not equipped to deal with’ support for the material, logistic nor emotional needs of those who fell outside of equality regulation, such as migrant members of academic communities, including non-national students and staff, particularly when their economic currency seemed at risk, such as with Chinese students (Paper 1). Similar claims were made in other publications where institutions dependent international student income informed ‘the immediate focus for many higher education leaders’ which was on ‘the potential fall in income because of the collapse of student markets’ (Lee, 2020). Their often problematic treatment during Covid19, led many international students to realise they were seen as ‘cash cows’ (such as in Australia, see Alcorn, 2020).

In the move to online learning within SA, a narrator noted that considerations of those disabled, migrant or neurodiverse were engulfed by the mainstreamed socio-economic inequalities within equity discourses.

Courses are designed with a common denominator in mind with limited time provided to consider differentiation. So, students and staff members that live with disabilities are particularly vulnerable during a time of remote online learning.

Many narrators highlighted that those experiencing mental ill-health were initially marginalised in discourses across both contexts (Paper 1). In the UK, where it is classified in equality acts as a ‘disability’, practitioner resources emerged (Jisc and Emerge Education, 2021; Officer for Students (OfS), 2020; Student Minds, 2020). It became more of a mainstream topic within HE discourses in both contexts, and broader, later during the pandemic (Defeyter et al., 2021; Naidoo & Cartwright, 2020; Visser & Law-van Wyk, 2021). The lack of public health and social care provision within SA, made this concern intersectional, as this SA-based narrator’s excerpt articulates.

All students are likely to be suffering stress and anxiety both about the studying itself and the future, but the well-off will, in all likelihood, have relatively easy access to mental health support.

In such ways, narratives indicated the ways in which the pandemic was unsettling omniscientific constructions of mind/ body, cognitive/ affective dualities. This included the mental ill-health of students and staff, and the blurring of ‘appropriate’ norms as many were ‘unable to “perform as professional” from home spaces’.

At the uni we are students and staff playing our required, remunerated roles. At home we are acting out all of our social and physical relations and roles as well. It is harder to keep them separate, and offer up each its pound of flesh. The personal and professional have been forced into an uncomfortable merger, where we are incessantly accessible.

In addition to ‘working from less than ideal circumstances, whether staff or student’ was the ‘dangerous lack of community and human contact that is essential to meaningful learning’, and what was experienced as a lack of consideration about digital fatigue and digital wellness. ‘Compulsory’, ‘obligatory’, ‘core’ time-sensitive changes posed threat to agency, flourishing and freedom. Not reflected at this early time of the pandemic when the narratives were written, were the myriad of ways individuals and groups created relational connections utilising the digital (for instance, see the innovations in digital conversations that were created at a South African university in Mkhize et al., 2021).

As a challenge-led community, narrators’ concerns sat primarily with addressing and mitigating problems with access. Despite that anxiety, within their narratives was space for dis-confirming evidence, such as of plural experiences of ERTL.

… one should not make any assumptions and be very careful about generalisations. It turns out that lockdown works for some people as it is so psychologically containing, and there is emerging evidence that some students prefer online learning.

Less anticipated were that many people found the shift online, or to home, worked for them in equity terms as they had found pre-Covid19 norms and demands stressful and exclusionary. In SA, where abuses soared as human rights were curbed during the restrictive militaristic lockdown measures in the early period (Gumede, 2020), there was ‘safe distance created by the virtual space’ (Paper 1, n.p.) that was also empowering for some marginalised by toxic institutional interactional norms. Similarly, UK-based migrant academics described complex ambiguities:

Those at the dark end of the politics of belonging are both given a reprieve (not having to perform bodily in alien spaces) but are also at risk of being completely isolated, to the point of dying alone for migrant academics and students. This was told to me by a student; but I feel it myself. The lack of community is showing itself – with clear indications of who is in and who is not, and the only indication of a problem is when a piece within the system of exchange (an assignment submission; deadline date for report etc.) is not provided. Performance of the head-and-shoulders in the screen even more enforces the Cartesian dichotomy.

Many narrators expressed hope that learning from the pandemic would extend to ‘more compassionate approaches’ in the long term. At this early stage, one articulated this as a hope that members of academic communities would ‘bring in their whole selves into the classroom, creating a space to share vulnerabilities, [which] may prompt us to get to learn our students better and continue some of these approaches when we come back from lockdown’.

Conclusions

In our positions as ‘academic migrants’ (Green & Little, 2013, p. 523), we move across academic, disciplinary and professional communities, operating within thresholds between a range of ‘evanescent interpretative communities’ (Elkins, 2001). ‘Un-rooted’ agents hold potential to create third spaces to navigate and renegotiate power margins, hierarchies and relationships. As this analysis indicates, we are arguably both well ‘placed to mediate, realizing that a decision may suit the purposes of two distinct groups but needs to be couched differently to be acceptable to each’ (Green & Little, 2013, p. 530), and well placed to observe and critique. Inevitably, though, tensions emerge in our roles, as scholar-practitioners often in support positions, attempting to enact service leadership at micro- and meso-level while negotiating differing interests and goods of the peoples and institutions of HE, where macro-level decision-making about technological adaptions overlooked knowledgeable insiders (Ndzinisa & Dlamini, 2022).

The acts of narration included within this study involved reflection-in-action during the rush of Covid19 restriction preparations and deliberations in South Africa and the UK, where many invited to contribute did not have capacity to respond; and an opportunity to utilise the narration process as a moment of reflection outside-of-action, to document cautions for scholarship shared with informed, critical friends as imagined readers. The narratives were produced at a time of preparation, waiting and anxiety on the precipice ‘before’ the pandemic would fully strike. In such conditions, ‘subjects reflect, shape and get shaped by their newly emerging experiences that constitute different subjectivities’ (Debele, 2020). Our reflective deliberations at that time—expressing what different individuals construed as problematic, prophetic, critical or hopeful—were framed as narrators re-drawing attention to equity as central to the educational endeavour at a time where it seemed most at risk. Our analysis revealed that this ‘object’ varied in shape and focus, impacted by the range of discourses we operate within, absorb and counter-act in our daily practices. Also represented within this paper were our contrasting interpretations as six co-authors, in part (in)formed by our differing orientations to remedial approaches as affirmative or transformative (to use the terminology of Fraser, 2005). In the process of constructing the representation within this paper, we sought neither to come to consensus on these issues nor to depict these as necessarily antagonistic or inconceivably co-existing in practice. While a more assertive orientation to this analysis might be sought after, particularly by readers looking for clear criticisms of the issues brought to light in this paper, we feel it more responsible as scholars to resist idealised framings of what might be the right or wrong questions to be asking in our analysis. As post-colonial we have sought to comprehend the complexities that have emerged from the ‘agony of crushed hopes’ where such hope is ‘the only viable resource’, to cite Inayataullah’s (2017 in Sajed 2021, 40) provocation. Rather than the idealism of uncrushed hopes, we hold that our ethical wisdom as post-colonial scholars obliges us to practice a critical pedagogy of compassion (Zembylas, 2013) in our writing because it is more productive and generative of building solidarities (Belluigi & Parkinson, 2020). Working from the standpoint of crushed hopes ‘speaks not only about the gap between desire and reality, but, most importantly, it points to a crucial question: what was actually possible?’ (Sajed, 2021).

The layers of subjectivity intrinsic to such narratives and acts of narration (Day Sclater, 2003) were revealing in how we constructed ourselves as narrating subjects and as the subject of narration in the characters of ‘academic developers’, ‘educational technologists’, ‘activists’, etc. These served the purposes of portraying with complexity our own positions to the issues of ‘equity’ in HE during the initial Covid19 disruptions—something to which an individual narrator can reflect on but cannot ultimately fully grasp. This recognition, of the many subjectivities in narrative, freed us as analysts from the notion that the layers should necessarily correspond, and enabled us to bring forth the contradictions and conflicts to which these narrators refer. Running across the narratives were the complicating and untangling contestations of the performativity of professional roles, in which narrators and their practices were positioned within the different communities of practice and scholarship in the broader umbrella of AD and professional groups of ‘management’, ‘support’, ‘research’; with often complicated relations to their own identities, agency and commitments to equity. The narratives were constructed for imagined readers within equity-concerned AD communities, and as such what we find presented to us are perceptions of the narrators’ institutions, the relation and obligations of the narrator to those in varied positions of power/lessness, and their assertions of what mattered in the moment when concerns about equity were deliberated, and the equity paradoxes and digital paradoxes which were already appearing. The views presented, no matter how critical and reflexive, were those of insiders with a vested stake in the debate and with a relatively protected perspective on what was occurring. Thus, as much as the narrators were able to observe and report on unsettled relations, masking and inauthentic playing of games and roles as uncomfortable mergers and alliances were formed, so too was their representation of such occurrences informed by the critical consciousness to move from reflection and motivation to action, as we asked each other, in facing the enormity of the beast in our midst, what do we adopt, shape, defer or resist when it comes to inequality? And then following this process and the time that has passed since then, how do we move from observed perceptions and cautions to more equitable actions?

Our analysis mapped the ways in which constructions of equity in higher education are reflective of geopolitical inequalities, including indications of whether actions and discourses are oriented towards equality or equity, are minority or majority concerns, and are marginalised or centred within discourse communities. The individualisation of ‘targets’ within the academy threaten to render invisible inequalities experienced by those not within its sights, and to construct agents through problematic binaries. Even at the earliest stages of the pandemic, whether based within the UK or South Africa, these insiders were able to see how the pandemic, its restrictions and ERLT required a wider gaze than that of the micro-curriculum of teaching-and-learning, pointing to the overlap with the wider ecology of educational impacts and responsibilities for broader interactions, social structures, familial and community relations, virtual and digital spaces, the nation state and global players. While the pandemic disruption may not be the moment to unsettle inequalities, throughout our analysis we have consistently foregrounded the critical questions which emerged early on within insiders’ narratives - such as what is erased, ignored or seen as hopeful? within and across national and geopolitical divides, and what are we to do? as agents within higher education to mitigate against the long-term consequences—of the discourses formed and decisions made—during Covid19, for the equity agenda of higher education going forward.