COVID-19 is advancing a new architecture of knowledge

South Africa, according to World Bank data, is the world’s most unequal society, divided by forms of racialised and gender inequality that emerge from its history of colonialism and apartheid.

The stark inequality in our social order became significantly more visible when our nation was suddenly plunged into a state of disaster more than a year ago.

Under Lockdown Level 5 (the hardest level), millions of South Africans who depend on a daily or weekly income for survival joined millions of others who were destitute long before the pandemic began. The virus has, thus, reinforced all forms of inequality.

It is against this backdrop that higher education institutions play a key role in ameliorating the impact of COVID-19 in South African society.

Public universities have always been connected to the community by virtue of their long-standing mission and commitment to quality teaching, research, and service to society.

However, since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, these key areas have been profoundly disrupted, forcing institutions to rethink their core business in ways that sustain community engagement and remain relevant both in the present and in the future.

External engagement disrupted

At the University of Cape Town (UCT), social responsiveness underscores the interconnectedness between research, teaching, and engagement (in other words, engaging a broad spectrum of stakeholders beyond the parameters of the campus) in pursuing the core business of a university.

With the outbreak of COVID-19, we draw attention to three interconnected themes, articulated in the University of Cape Town’s 2020-21 Social Responsiveness Report: resilience, opportunities, and challenges. These three areas reflect principle issues that have emerged during the pandemic.

The outbreak of the pandemic put to the test UCT’s agility in conducting its core business. The university’s engagement with external partners was disrupted in ways that made it almost impossible to adhere to its principles of engagement.

The university’s conceptualisation of ‘engagement’ is based on a bilateral approach to interacting with community partners in addressing societal needs.

This philosophy emphasises an intentional shift away from an ‘expert model’ of delivering university knowledge to the public toward a more collaborative model in which community partners play a significant role in participating, creating and sharing knowledge to the benefit of both the university and the broader society.

The outbreak of COVID-19 severely challenged this two-way interactive model of engagement.

Given the disruption of the pandemic to ‘normal’ life, it would have been easier for most university-community partnerships to revert to a one-way approach to delivering knowledge and services to communities.

Several faculty projects, however, have managed to facilitate their engagement in mutually reciprocal ways, albeit using different, and at times more inventive, strategies.

Throughout the university there was evidence of new, contextually relevant engagement with the community, demonstrating a new era of innovative practices.

Resilience requires people in organisations to adapt and thrive even in tumultuous conditions. It is this adaptation which yields new opportunities, which, as we have seen over the course of the pandemic, have enriched our scholarly practice.

New connectivity and research pathways

Examples in the Social Responsiveness Report demonstrate how partnerships between the university and society have turned to new, virtual ways of staying connected.

In many cases, university departments have maximised their use of social media platforms and community WhatsApp groups, becoming a resource for COVID-19-related information.

In this way, they have ensured that their community participants were kept up to date with current and changing information. These platforms provided interactive engagements between academics and external partners in ways that would not have been envisioned before COVID-19.

Although the outbreak of the pandemic disrupted research plans in many instances, it also opened new research pathways for many academics.

Collaboration across universities and disciplines, as well as with several government departments, is one of the key insights brought about by the pandemic.

COVID-19 also provided an opportunity for many academics to empower communities through the media. Various departmental members contributed to printed media such as Daily Maverick, News24, You and Milady magazine with publications on mental health, wellbeing and self-care in the time of COVID-19.

Local radio stations such as KFM, Radio Sonder Grense (Radio Without Borders) and hospital radio stations used many departmental members for discussions on mental health, parenting or supporting people with disabilities during lockdown.

Ordinarily, these media outlets would not necessarily have been on the radar of many academics as platforms to disseminate valuable information.

Although UCT’s social responsiveness policy framework impresses upon academics to draw on their scholarly expertise to engage with external scholars, the current pandemic context challenged many of the social safety nets which supported local communities in times of need.

This provided an opportunity for many staff and students to pursue their civic duties in new and innovative ways.

As COVID-19 spread globally, it became clear that not only was it creating unprecedented disruption for individuals at a physical level, but it was also severely impacting individuals at a social and emotional level.

Yet, while there has justifiably been an emphasis on medical responses, too often social science and humanities perspectives have been ignored, leading in some instances to policies and practices that have been unhelpful in terms of mitigating the negative impact of the virus.

So glaring was the absence of humanities disciplines in these processes that the Academy of Science of South Africa made a special call for greater involvement of social scientists among decision-makers guiding government in the formulation of new policies. Academics from the humanities played a key role in informing government policy on human behaviour and interaction.

Focus on mental health effects

Despite the challenges, COVID-19 provided opportunities to collaborate with renowned international experts in efforts to help communities cope with the mental and emotional stress and anxiety caused by the pandemic.

Despite the significant role played by numerous academics at UCT during this period, there have been obvious challenges that staff, students and our community partners continue to grapple with.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a pervasive impact on all clinical, teaching and research activities and has severely impacted our ability to access and reach our community-based partners.

Most homes in the Western Cape have not been able to access online resources due to the lack of adequate computers and-or smartphones, as well as reliable network and affordable data. Again, this has sharply amplified the inequalities in our society, and the urgent need at an educational level to address the gaps that exist in our schools.

A further challenge at a public health level was that the concentration of resources on COVID-19-related complications meant that other diseases did not receive adequate attention.

Similarly, child and adolescent mental health services were not given sufficient resources. Adolescents with mental illness still do not have a ward specifically allocated to them.

Hospitals were associated with stigma and many parents did not want to attend appointments for fear of contracting the virus, with the result that patients limited their hospitals visit to life-threatening diseases.

Delaying or avoiding critical treatment has placed an enormous burden on hospital facilities and on the health system in general.

Furthermore, the national lockdown made it increasingly difficult for healthcare workers to maintain regular contact with their patients. Several public messaging initiatives were created by departments in the faculty of health sciences to maintain contact with patients and ensure that they received accurate information.

The social responsiveness work of the university over the period of the pandemic has revealed that the boundary which formerly demarcated society from science has been regularly transgressed and that the closer interaction between science and society signals the emergence of a new, more contextualised or context-sensitive science.

Resilience, opportunities and challenges

Community-university engagement at UCT is moving ahead, not as an exclusively academic project, but with a more holistic, integrative focus through incorporating a range of knowledge from community wisdom to epidemiology.

COVID-19 is advancing a new architecture of knowledge. Lessons learned from a review of submissions from across the university to the Social Responsiveness Report suggest that responses and solutions to the conditions arising from COVID-19 are not bound by specific disciplines.

While universities are structured along disciplinary lines, it has become evident that effective community engagement is contingent upon interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices.

Given the complexities that COVID-19 has highlighted, anything short of a transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and community-engaged approach will truncate our ability as a university to grasp the full impact of the pandemic, and to yield solutions that are appropriate to local contexts.

The focus here, and in the Social Responsiveness Report on the broad themes of resilience, opportunities, and challenges, offers a lens for UCT – and universities around the world – to examine and critically reflect on its core business.

Going forward, we need to grasp with depth and complexity how institutions of higher learning might begin to reset and engage with the existing inequalities magnified by the pandemic. This is a fundamental issue which confronts higher education all over the world if it wishes to remain socially engaged and contextually relevant.

Sonwabo Ngcelwane is the research and development coordinator (engaged scholarship) in the research office of UCT. Dr Patti Silbert (PhD) is the project manager of the Schools Improvement Initiative in the Schools Development Unit at UCT.