The Day After Covid-19
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The Day After Covid-19 Petar Jandrić 1,2 Accepted: 15 September 2020 / Published online: 23 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Keywords Covid-19 . Pandemic . Postdigital . Research . Science . Education . Viral
modernity . Bioinformationalism
Down into the Rabbit Hole Nine months ago, on 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization (2020) reported the first official case of ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’ in Wuhan. As the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) embarked on its journey around the world, it took less than 80 days to wreak global havoc. Already in March, daily news reports were bursting with numbers of infected and deceased, and social networks were overflowing with conspiracy theories (Fuller 2020; Rose 2020; McLaren 2020). Many countries were in or near massive lockdowns, those still unaffected closed down their borders, and a stubborn minority counted the dead and prayed for the miracle of herd immunity. The world had entered into uncharted waters, and it is still unknown which of many employed strategies will yield best results in the long run (Gibney 2020). The medical community immediately poured all available resources into researching the coronavirus, and social sciences, humanities, and the arts joined within less than a couple of months (Jandrić 2020a). Academic publishers gave up their revenue and offered open access to all Covid-19-related scholarly articles free of charge (Wellcome Trust 2020). Celebrity academics published their first books on the pandemic (Žižek 2020; see Whitcomb 2020); Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020) has sparked huge debates and rabid attempts at censorship (Jandrić 2020b; Yan 2020). While the so-called essential workers tirelessly and selflessly labored against the unknown threat to provide the rest of us with food, electricity, medical services, education, and everything else that comprises modern life, researchers
* Petar Jandrić [email protected]
1
Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
2
University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK
532
Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:531–537
of all shapes and hues have devoted all the energy they could muster to try and make sense of what happens to humankind. On 21 March 2020, Postdigital Science and Education joined these efforts following my editorial ‘Postdigital Research in the Time of Covid-19’ and the call for papers which invited the community to ‘explore all imaginable aspects of this large social experiment that the Covid-19 pandemic has lain down in front of us’ (Jandrić 2020a: 237). For better or worse, I remembered words that McKenzie Wark told me a few years back: ‘the first challenge for education is to think how to even describe the more abstract contours of the present in a way that is neither old wine in new bottles nor new wine in old bottles’ (in Jandrić 2017: 115). Inspired by these words, and following my long-term obsession with transdisciplinarity (see Jandrić and Hayes 2020a), I issued a hectic,
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