Afterword

The stories collected in this book capture a moment in time – a time of profound disruption, uncertainty, and unexpected potential. But rather than simply refracting it towards the ‘new normal’, they show that for universities, the COVID-19 pandemic was more than just a phase through which we passed from one static ‘pre-pandemic’ state to a different, ‘post-pandemic’, one. Indeed, the transformative practices shared by our contributors reveal the changes catalysed by the disruption to be part of an ongoing and dynamic space of ‘becoming’ in academia. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) radical concept offers us a powerful framework for understanding change and transformation in higher education. Their rhizomatic model critiques the idea of a linear pathway or journey through an experience or towards a specific goal, since ‘a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination’ (pp. 341–342). In rejecting a fixed starting point or final objective, the rhizome is instead ‘the conjunction, “and … and … and …”’ (p. 26), allowing space for multiplicities, fluid connections, and porous boundaries (Gravett, 2021). Paired with their image of the assemblage, defined as ‘active, always emergent and changing confederations of bodies, objects, spaces, affects, forces and desires’ (Taylor and Harris-Evans, 2018, p. 1258), transformation becomes a continuous, dynamic process of becoming: always in flux, never finished.