“Crisis and the Everyday: Global Connections, Resistance, and Solidarity”

This essay introduces a collection of articles that reflect the tension between the truncated globality of the COVID-19 pandemic and the contradictions and conflicts that are immanent within capitalism. The authors discuss the differentiated impact of the pandemic on workers. In doing that, they remind us that it is important to reflect on our own position as teacher-workers and researcher-workers even as we write about workers who may belong in a different world of work. Often exposed to far greater levels of precarity, danger, and exploitation, the experiences of migrant, factory, or agricultural laborers in the workplace are not equivalent to that of many teachers and researchers in academia. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether there are threads that connect workers across these different worlds of work. The experience of withdrawing from the panel in solidarity with teacher workers of UK academia has taught us that these threads exist- the lives of adjuncts and tenured professors are interconnected as much as the lives of domestic workers and working women are connected or the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh and workers in the fashion world in the US are connected. As Rogaly and Schling (2022) remind us when they quote David Featherstone, solidarity emerges through collective activity – by doing things together. This collection of short essays is the record of a moment of solidarity, of striking together in the world of work called academia.