Ally Krueger-Kischak
For the increasingly large cohort of undergraduate students who have no conception of the pre-pandemic university, these past few academic years have been a blur – in multiple senses of the word. Boundaries, binaries, structure, and separation have been warped through the online learning experience. Divisions between home/school, public/private space, and student/educator have become increasingly muddled.
This blurring has underpinned the whole of the Pandemic U experience. However, it is not by any means a new concept. In stumbling across Donna Haraway’s 1985 A Cyborg Manifesto recently, I was surprised to hear Haraway, nearly 40 years prior, describe a blur that I and so many of my peers have felt in this virtual learning environment.
Haraway’s essay can be read as a commentary on the postmodern blur as a whole, but particularly the blur between human-beings and technology. In A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway argues that we have all become cyborgs as our connection with technology has deepened. However, she wrote this in an era of technology when most universities lacked functional websites, let alone entire digital learning platforms. In this new era of virtual post-secondary space, many of the concepts Haraway proposes in her essay as potential future issues are manifest as our common realities.
Particularly in relation to expression of identity/identities, A Cyborg Manifesto provides insight into cyborgs’ (in this case, students’) methods of warping the self in complex ways. In today’s Zoom classrooms, identity has the opportunity to fade away as individual students become blank Zoom boxes on a laptop screen. Appearance, if ever publicized, can be carefully and intentionally curated in new and heightened ways. If students remain anonymous, identifiers can be masked or disappear entirely. Class can be obscured, as can age, gender, race, ability, and other intersections. In these 21st-century virtual spaces, we manifest the blank, blurred, or identity-obscured future that A Cyborg Manifesto describes.
This cyborg-ification has a direct impact on how we move through our undergraduate degrees. Being grey Zoom-boxed makes it difficult to feel any sort of connection to peers, professors, and the university institution as a whole. In my near-entirely online degree thus far, this blurring has not merely resulted in the merger of human and technology. Rather, it feels like I, as a human being, have become entirely subsumed into digital learning technology. The laptop is not an extension of myself; I am an extension of the laptop. Zoom usernames like “Ally’s iPhone” become a statement of my device’s presence in the virtual classroom rather than the human being herself.
During Ontario universities’ recent return to in-person classes, I and others have recently had our first opportunities to experience lectures in-person. This has been our first time sharing physical space with peers whose virtual usernames have been peripheral to us for months, if not years. It has been a shock to feel these identities in new and much more physical ways after years of being a blank Zoom box.
Although A Cyborg Manifesto’s descriptions of the cyborg identity are felt by undergraduate students today, Haraway’s conclusions do not match this current reality. Rather than opening up a new space for “affinity and unity,” these last two years have been deeply isolating for many. As North American post-secondary institutions begin our return to physical campuses and in person learning, a question opposite to the Manifesto’s “How does this blur come about?” emerges:
How do we un-blur? Can we? Should we?
At this point, we are in a space beyond what Haraway could have predicted in 1985. The blur has lost its appeal. As pandemic restrictions continue to loosen, questions of blur and un-blur will continue to be raised as institutions create new post-pandemic post-secondary learning environments.