The pandemic, race and the crisis of the neoliberal university: study notes from lockdown London

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.