COVID-19 and emergency eLearning: Consequences of the securitization of higher education for post-pandemic pedagogy

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic quickly led to the closure of universities and colleges around the world, in hopes that public health officials’ advice of social distancing could help to flatten the infection curve and reduce total fatalities from the disease. Drawing on Copenhagen school securitization theory and analyzing 25 declarations of emergency eLearning at American universities, I argue that in addition to COVID-19 being framed as a general threat, face-to-face schooling was also presented as a threat through these policies. A review of securitization theory—with particular attention to the question of advocacy and the relationship of desecuritization to emancipation—grounds the investigation theoretically. I argue that securitization theory is an important tool for educators not only for observing (and understanding) the phenomenon of emergency eLearning, but also for advocating the desecuritization of schooling after the COVID-19 crisis passes.

KEYWORDS:

• Securitization
• COVID-19
• state of exception
• desecuritization
• emancipation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor and reviewers of Contemporary Security Policy for their most insightful comments shared in the process of revising the article. An earlier version of the argument received helpful comments from Veronica Kitchen, Heather Smith, and Tanya Irwin from the WIIS-Toronto Twitter Conference, as well as Andrew Heffernan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. The views and opinions expressed in this article are the work of the author and do not necessarily reflect an official position of the Algonquin & Lakeshore CDSB.

Notes on contributor

Michael P. A. Murphy is a SSHRC doctoral fellow in International Relations and Political Theory at the University of Ottawa, and an associate member of the University of Ottawa Research Unit in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. He serves as an elected school board trustee, Editorial Assistant at Security Dialogue, and member-at-large for ISA’s Active Learning in International Affairs Section. He has published over a dozen articles on International Relations theory, political theory, and pedagogy, appearing in International Relations, the Journal of International Political Theory, Critical Studies on Security, the Journal of Political Science Education, and elsewhere. His work can be found at: http://bit.ly/37NJMkZ

Notes

1 For the logic of the exception, see Schmitt (2005); for the definition of politics as friend/enemy, see Schmitt (2007). However, it is important to recall that the shared examination of exceptional politics does not mean that securitization and emergency exceptionalism are the same phenomenon—on this point, see Murphy (2019).

2 The name “COVID-19” officially replaced “2019-nCoV” one month earlier, on 11 February (Guarner, 2020, p. 420).

3 The case fatality rate is a moving average highly sensitive to the number of the poor identification of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic individuals. Fauci et al. (2020) note that because of this uncertainty “the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%” (p. 1).

4 Johnson et al. (2006) share the story of Delgado Community College, where 20 of 25 buildings had significant water damage.

5 E.g., “I write this letter,” “I ask you to take care of yourselves,” and similar.

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.