ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the global COVID-19 pandemic has queered the academy. It is not the agency of the virus that has caused global chaos, but rather it has uncovered and accelerated existing stratifications and asymmetrical power relations between social classes; the sexes; and the core and periphery in the global knowledge economy. Crisis or catastrophe capitalism has surfaced necropolitics, and productivist models in the form of who has the right to life, employment, and intimacy. The authors suggest that the virus has signalled the lack of robustness and resilience in systems, and has infected and exposed fragilities in the relationships, infrastructures, networks, activities, cultures, welfare services, employment regimes, mental health, and pedagogies of higher education. Norms have been reinforced, for example, the heteronormative family household, patterns of intimacy, and what counts as home. Norms have also been disrupted; for example, humans are biohazards and agents of contamination as well as consumers and producers of knowledge in the global academy. A key question is whether the Great Pause can facilitate new imaginaries for breathable critical epistemic and social futures in higher education that queer the stale, tired repetitions of cognitive capitalism, heteronormativity, and tediously predictable social exclusions?
