Marta Songin-Mokrzan

Fast Science, Neoliberal Regimes of Productivity and ICT Technologies: Academy in the Era of COVID-19 Pandemic

The goal of the article is to answer the following question: what does the pandemic of COVID -19 reveal in the context of the discussion dedicated to the ways of the functioning of the academy today? Therefore the subject of the analysis is not the disease itself nor its cultural meanings, but the phenomena that, although present before the pandemic outbreak, became far more clear, perceptible and acutely experienced. In the article, our interest is focused on the increase of the pace of virtual social interactions, the speed of information transfer, the enhancement of academic regimes of productivity, the surplus of knowledge generated within the fields of humanities and social sciences and the role of information and communications technologies played in these processes. The main argument is that, the pandemic of COVID-19 shows how, in the context of the academy, the entire logics of late capitalist social relations and neoliberal governing of social subjects is focused.

The article focuses on selected aspects of transnational entrepreneurship, understood in terms of actions that go beyond national borders and lead to long-lasting innovations in sociotechnical spaces. These considerations rest on the ethnographic research conducted in years 2013–2016 in a globally oriented company situated in south-western Poland. While exploring the issue, the author moves between diff erent scales of analysis: from the macro-level of the postsocialist state, through the global infrastructure of neoliberal politics, to the specific working environment and the regional context. Th e adopted strategy of shift ing perspectives is applied in order to point to the larger political, historical and economic contexts in which specifi c places are embedded and which infl uence the trajectories of lives of employees of global enterprises.