Care in the Time of COVID-19: Accounting for Academic Care Labor

This article engages with care as an increasingly marketed yet inconsistently articulated and accounted form of labor in the space of the university. As the COVID-19 crisis has thrown into sharp relief the inequities and fragilities of an increasingly market-driven university sector, it has also enabled us to reframe questions surrounding what we value about and within the university. In order to explore faculty perceptions and distributions of care as it was expected and performed in universities during the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted a qualitative survey. Results demonstrated that while care is an increasingly essential feature of academic labor, it remains largely invisible, misunderstood, unaccounted for, and unequally distributed.