COVID Care Crisis Symposium

The COVID Care Crisis Symposium held in January 2021 convened dozens of scholars to theorize about what the organizers labeled as the unfolding “COVID Care Crisis” and its effects on legal academia. During that two-day event, scholars, teachers, students, and practitioners shared the difficulties of managing the demands of work and the constantly shifting changes to care infrastructures. The Symposium amplified the voices of caregivers and sounded the alarm on how disparities, if left unaddressed, could alter the landscape of academia long into the future and further marginalize women and scholars of color as well as other primary caregiving faculty and staff. Many speakers published their Symposium papers in a just-released volume in FIU Law Review as well as in other venues.

As we enter the third year of COVID, we see in schools, workplaces, and public spaces a push to “return to normal.” Schools at all levels are now mostly back to in-person instruction; masking, testing, and other protective measures are declining or disappearing. Yet caregivers remain in a bind, with limited options or institutional support. COVID outbreaks continue as do school closures. Moreover, with the end of masking, people with disabilities and immunocompromised people, as well as their caregivers, are in a precarious position. Young children have not been vaccinated and remain vulnerable. And the effects of long COVID are only now being studied. The negative impacts of the pandemic are falling hardest on marginalized students, faculty and staff and their families.

Yet institutional and structural responses have been minimal or lacking entirely. Even the simplest accommodations from the early stages of the pandemic are now harder to obtain. For many the conditions of employment have become so unacceptable that they have led to an exodus from formal or in-person work. The losses in research, knowledge production, career progression and even visibility that were predicted for caregivers as the pandemic began have materialized, but have been generally met by silence. The collapse in work-life balance is ongoing, but no longer a subject of discussion. While many of us have returned to work, work has changed and yet the challenges have remained or even intensified.

This second symposium seeks to take stock of COVID responses and to re-envision the workplace, to imagine the future of work, and to dream new realities for the academy. For legal academia, what has changed? And if change has not come, why not? And for the future, what changes can we envision and implement—individually, collectively, and institutionally? The hard work of rebuilding, renewal and re-imagining has begun, and we invite you to join us in naming, theorizing, and building solidarity to meet these challenges.