COVID-19 initially closed universities forcing rapid adoption of online teaching. This chapter reflects on pandemic recovery in the context of higher education and explores some of the longer-term impacts that the pandemic has had on academic practice. Recovery is a complex and highly differentiated process and is founded upon resilience that is configured from ordinary rather than extraordinary phenomena. These processes include established social relationships based on extant friendship networks combined with investments in digital skills and related infrastructures. The chapter explores pandemic legacies and higher education focussing on implications for practice as this relates to teaching, learning, research and administration.@en

Any one shock is never isolated from other shocks and any one recovery process will be complicated by further related and unrelated shocks and their related recovery processes. This chapter highlights the interactions that occur between shocks that are experienced in parallel or simultaneously and those that occur linearly and take the form of shock chains. These shock processes suggest that there needs to be further social science research on the complexity of shock and related recovery processes, to contribute to academic debate, but also to inform practice, policy development, and implementation. There needs to be a new social science research agenda on characterizing the features of the recovery society. A key issue is that there are many alternative recovery pathways and that each emerges through a set of iterative relationships between people, place, organisations, institutions, and governance processes. These alternatives reflect path dependency and previous decisions and related investments but are complicated by place-based intersectionality that compounds the ways in which parallel shocks and shock chains, and related recovery processes, interact with one another forming highly contextualised shock-related impacts and which then mediate the impacts of recovery processes in practice.@en

The nature of shocks and crisis is highly diverse; crises and shocks tend to conglomerate rather than occur as single events. People and places are affected differently and have distinct abilities and resources to respond, cope and recover. Key here are path-dependent socio-economic living conditions along with pre-existent intersectional burdens that are constitutive of the everyday abilities of people and places to recover, to some extent, from shocks. There is not one type of recovery, but several parallel recovery processes. Such recoveries are deeply fragmented and reflect the harsh realities of inequitable societies which are simultaneously risk and recovery societies. Places, people, and policy are unprepared for new crises that would have similar (or worse) impacts than the COVID-19 pandemic. New theoretical development is required to characterise the new paradigm of recovery society which is based on understanding how society responds in practice to the direct, indirect, induced, and latent impacts of shocks and hazards.@en

Drawing on the contributions from the edited volume Living with Pandemics: People, Place and Policy this chapter develops a framework for post-pandemic policy and research agendas. The chapter identifies three stages to a pandemic - preparedness, responsiveness and recovery - and argues that this triad of interconnections should underpin the development of a Preparedness, Responsiveness and Recovery Research and Policy Framework (PRP). The chapter argues that people and places must be at the centre of the PRP framework followed by a focus on organisational and government policy innovation, impacts, improvisation, and adaptation strategies. Each element of the PRP framework involves society, economy, governance, and data through localised and hence spatialised diagnostics of problems and responses. The chapter also highlights the importance of understanding the relationship between biology and life as a cross-cutting theme of such a framework.@en

The catalyst for this book emerged in late 2019 with the first reports of a ‘mystery pneumonia’ taking hold in the Chinese city of Wuhan (Horton, 2020). This virus was confirmed by authorities as a new type of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS) and given the acronym COVID-19 (‘co’ for corona, ‘vi’ for virus and ‘d’ for disease and ’19 for the year in which it was identified). For more than a year the pandemic that followed has transformed the everyday experiences of nearly everyone living on Earth and created significant and often dramatic changes in life trajectories (Žižek, 2020). COVID-19 transformed the relationships between people and place and challenged politicians and officials to engage in rapid and unprecedented policy improvisation intended to save lives and reduce the negative impacts of the pandemic. Some of these transformations will result in permanent alterations and others will be transitory, while the wider impacts will continue to emerge for decades to come. This book is published at a time when COVID-19 is still being experienced and the dust has not yet settled. This is intentional.@en