Redefining Adaptation in a (Post-)Covid Society

Covid, Adaptation and the Arts

Report of an online seminar organized by the Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham, 16^th November 2022

This seminar, the first in a series reflecting on various processes and experiences of adaptation in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, was launched by a paper given by Dr Luis Medina Cordova on recent examples of ‘fast’ or ‘flash’ fiction (microcuentos) from Ecuador, Mexico and Argentina. These are very brief, fragmentary and suggestive stories that deliberately leave a great deal unsaid (an example given was Augusto Monterroso’s El dinosaurio: “When he/she woke up, the dinosaur was still there”). Works such as this throve in (and indeed in many cases were spawned by) the socially distanced culture imposed by Covid. They were largely transmitted via such social media as Twitter and Facebook; this enabled them to be translated (using online tools) into various languages; and, perhaps above all, they designedly initiated new forms of active collaboration between author and reader. As intrinsically ‘open’ texts, microcuentos both invite and indeed require their readers to suggest reactions, continuations, completions, innovative twists of their own; and such acts of creative reception – also circulated widely via social media – in turn helped to create a thriving and in many ways democratic culture of literary productivity. This, Luis argued,  constituted an innovative and signally appropriate form of adaptation to the constraints and opportunities afforded by Covid; and it also challenged such established literary hege­monies as the perceived superiority of novels over shorter fictional forms, and of print over electronic media.  

Thereafter discussion ranged widely, but frequently revolved around the sense of an often productive tension – encapsulated in the microcuentos, but intrinsic also to many other exper­iences of Covid – between constraint and creative freedom. Constraint was of course felt not least by practitioners of the performing arts, suddenly deprived of live audiences and of the opportunity to interact with them. Here too, however, many innovative new outlets were found: musicians reached out to new audiences through the use of subjectively re-styled ‘cover versions’; choirs and other organizations experimented with highly sophis­ticated forms of online presentation; radio drama and podcasts throve as a socially distanced popu­lation became increasingly dependent on the recorded spoken word. 

It was acknowledged also that, as with people in other walks of life, not all artists succeeded in adapting successfully to the constraints of Covid, and that, in late 2022, audiences for many creative events remain markedly smaller than they were before the pandemic. Nevertheless both Luis’s paper and the ensuing discussion highlighted a number of hard-won but unequivocal positives that had emerged from the collective Covid experience. Not least among these was a perceptible, if still nascent and fragile sense of barriers being broken down – between previously competing or mutually exclusive art forms and media; and, perhaps above all, between ‘elite’ authors/artists and their audiences, previously often passive, but now encouraged by the realities of lockdown to become co-creators and co-adapters, participants in a more democratic and collective artistic process. This process can perhaps be seen as another mani­festation of the increased sense of community and of social cohesion that was widely felt, particularly in the second half of 2020 – but whose continuing existence has often seemed brittle and imperilled, as artists, like the rest of us, have had to adapt (again!) to society’s new uneasy blend of the ‘normal’ and the ‘new normal’. 

Covid, Adaptation, and Education

Report of an online seminar organised by the Department of Modern Languages,University of Birmingham, 14th December 2022

The second in this series of workshops on adaptation and Covid-19 focused on the subject of education. The session began with a paper by Professor Nigel Harris, who reflected on both his personal experience of adapting education provision during the pandemic, and the wider, international context of educational adaptation(s) in response to Covid-19. Nigel’s paper identified five key adaptations that affected education practitioners and their students:

(1) technological, involving a need to shift teaching online and become accustomed to new software and skills associated with this (e.g. Zoom); 

(2) pedagogical, and the (perceived) need to prepare more rigorously and dilute material in order to make it more readily digestible in an online setting; 

(3) spatial, turning a room within the home into a classroom, with associated feelings of space being invaded, but also removing time spent commuting; 

(4) social, with more time spent on checking student wellbeing, as well as having to manage issues of social interaction and etiquette online (e.g. cameras being turned off, mutes on); 

(5) assessment, with exams completed at home, where problematically, in the case of language assessments, students had access to dictionaries and other resources, making it difficult to gain an accurate picture of their language levels and learning.

The second part of Nigel’s paper mapped these five adaptations onto an international context of educational provision. Drawing on one of the first scholarly appraisals of the impact of Covid-19 (Fernando M. Reimers, ed., Primary and Secondary Education during Covid-19: Disruptions to Educational Opportunity during a Pandemic (Palgrave, 2022)), he explained how the readiness to shift teaching online varied greatly from one country to another. In Austria, Finland, and Belgium, the percentage of teachers who felt sufficiently prepared to ‘go electronic’ did not exceed 28%, whereas in South America, these percentages tended to be much higher. In Mexico, for example, 80% of teachers declared themselves ready to move online quickly. Ultimately, however, in Mexico and Bangladesh (where 5.6% of households own computers), significant investment was made in producing educational television programmes.

Finally, Nigel turned to the question of global justice, reflecting on the ways in which nationality and social class resulted in very different experiences of education during the pandemic. In the subsequent discussion, colleagues proceeded to consider how many students and their teachers were excluded from desirable practices of adaptation during the pandemic as a result of factors ranging from technological poverty to the difficulty of accessing vaccines. Colleagues concluded that whilst adaptation may work well and prove beneficial in some environments, this is by no means the case universally. The final part of the discussion also highlighted how education proved a key site of our shifting relationship with the pandemic/lockdown, enabling us to see the positives of adaptation (technologically, socially, spatially), but also its shortcomings, not least the frequently negative impact of rapid and wide-ranging change on mental health.

How did our (in)ability to adapt during the pandemic affect mental health? In what ways was adaptation used to promote better mental wellbeing? What lessons can we learn from our response to Covid-19 about the relationship between adaptation and mental health?

Zoom link: https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83370550180

How did the pandemic impact upon the experience and sharing of faith? What new modes of working resulted from this? What has been the effect on communities of changes in how faith is expressed and supported?

What have we learned about adaptation / society’s capacity to adapt that can be retained / redeployed in the future? How might some of the innovative practices that we have developed during the pandemic be used to widen access to the arts / education / culture / faith? How has the pandemic changed the way we think about adaptation as a concept?