Lockdown literacies and semiotic assemblages: academic boundary work in the Covid-19 crisis

In March 2020, populations were forced into home quarantine to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Universities moved the majority of their operations to homeworking, with profound implications for students, academics, and professional services staff. This paper analyses interview and visual data collected as part of a study on the impact of 'moving online' on staff at a large UK university. Drawing on sociomaterial perspectives, it considers the status and role of academics' literacy practices under lockdown, focusing particularly on the ways in which a range of boundaries are negotiated - spatial, temporal, material, digital, professional, personal and emotional - in a setting where conventional boundaries have been profoundly disrupted. We argue that these practices form part of emergent, restless and shifting semiotic assemblages. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this conceptual shift for academic work, meaning-making and academic subjectivities, in lockdown and beyond.