Global higher education and COVID-19: A virtual autoethnography of a faculty

In the online community of global higher education, idiosyncrasy and sociality are mutually reinforcing forces that shape the cognitive aspirations and anxieties of students, teachers, administrators, and other players who are pulled together and apart by social problems and competing demands. During the global crisis caused by COVID-19, idiosyncrasy prevailed, in part owing to growing disagreements on the value of various strategies for disease containment, mandatory measures to prevent outbreaks, and social responses to the pandemic. Living in a politicized and increasingly polarized environment, where consensus was lacking on whether protecting public health should come ahead of opening the economy, implied numerous tensions for local and international learners alike. This chapter employs virtual autoethnography to provide a self-reflexive perspective on being a citizen and an academic operating during pandemic-driven lockdown in globally interconnected cyberspace, which can act as a sanctuary but also as a space where pandemonium is created by the emotional tribulations and conflicting messages of disparate local and international actors. With an analytical approach to autoethnography contributing to the discourse on stress and anxiety in global higher education, this chapter calls for deeper engagement with idiosyncrasy to enable a better understanding of the diverse and conflicting narratives and memories that shape our increasingly cyber-bound societies. Copyright © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Roy Y. Chan, Krishna Bista, Ryan M. Allen; individual chapters, the contributors.