The “new normal” of academia in pandemic times: Resisting toxicity through care

In this piece, we dwell on the shadow sides of the “new normal” of academic labor during the pandemic. As the greedy, neoliberal university penetrates our homes and bodies during lockdown, it infuses our (work) lives with a magnitude of mixed pressures and troublesome effects and affects. Embedded in very different home situations, we explore autoethnographically how we are affected similarly and differently, through questioning our senses of toxic productivity, toxic passivity and toxic affectivity. We recast toxicity as – not a characteristic of the university but – a fundamentally relational issue which works through and exacerbates individualization and isolation in the context of the pandemic, thus requiring relational forms of feminist resistance in response. For this purpose, we develop an approach for writing our differences together, which cares for and fleshes out our lived, multifaceted experiences including the filth and shame associated with the toxic new normal. In doing so, we are not escaping toxicity, but reconfiguring our embodiments and enactments of it by caring for ourselves and others, which re‐energizes us to push back and unsettle how we may live academia, and perhaps become happy academics, during this crisis and beyond.