Rebuilding cultures of community on a post-COVID-19 university campus

Kylie Message

Universities and workplaces everywhere suffered from the disruptions of COVID-19 throughout 2020–21. Within an Australian context, The Australian National University (ANU) was unusual because the pandemic was just one of multiple crises that caused staff and students to experience consecutive waves of displacement over a five-year period. A flash flood in 2018, a massive hailstorm in 2020,¹ and bushfires and Black Summer smoke in 2019–20 all sent staff and students home for significant durations. As I write this in 2023, the long journey of rebuilding attachments between people and places that is necessary to restore the campus as a site of sociability, ideas and community continues to be disrupted by remediation and repair work.

To give some context to the impact of these crises, it is helpful to understand that ANU is not a densely urbanised nineteenth-century sandstone university like the University of Sydney or University of Melbourne. Founded in 1946 on a site that was allocated for university use in Walter Burley Griffin’s 1916 design of Canberra,² the cultural landscape of ANU remains consistent with the low-rise profiles of ‘Garden City’ and ‘City Beautiful’ styles of town planning.³ It occupies 145 hectares in central Canberra and has a distributed network of 150-odd buildings. Staff often describe the distance between buildings in units of time—how long it takes to walk from one to another. People ride bikes or simply drive between locations. While cars in parking buildings were spared the 2020 hailstorm, 120 buildings were damaged and most cars in uncovered carparks were written off by insurance companies. The flash flood of 2018 had no less impact than COVID as it wreaked havoc over the university’s entire library network.

Four years after the hailstorm, most ANU staff and students have replaced their cars and are back to regular commuting.⁴ But the disruption to institutional practices of place-making continue as our buildings—and many of our books, collections, and other core tools and assets located on site—remain captured within the spiders’ webs of ‘hail remediation’, which is the phrase employed to describe the process of repairing rooves and re-waterproofing interior office spaces.

Scaffolding

This essay emerged from a process of workshopping ideas for an annual theme for the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) for 2024. The HRC aims to function as a place, an action and a community dedicated to intellectual excellence and public impact, connection and exchange across all fields of human endeavour. It is Australia’s oldest humanities research centre and has, since 1977, organised its programs around an annual theme that is selected to intersect with global matters of contemporary interest and disciplinary investigation. Forward planning always involves past reflection, so scoping out a meaningful theme for the coming year provided a reason to consider the HRC’s recent themes of ‘Repair’ (2023), ‘Mobilities’ (2022), ‘Hope’ (2021) and ‘Crisis’ (2019) in relation to outcomes achieved by researchers affiliated with the centre throughout those years. It also urged us to consider previous themes in the context of broader changes that characterised our lives and workplaces from 2019 to the present day.

As I reflected on past themes, a correlation emerged with the global and local events that played out through the same period. I decided to ask people from 12 different buildings or work areas to describe what the physical dislocations and continual shifting of their workplaces has meant for them, focusing on their buildings, collections, research and teaching, communities, and access to and use of space.

The following essay uses the HRC’s recent themes to frame and interpret responses from colleagues working and studying at ANU about what it has been like to return to work in the post-COVID-19 period as our buildings, library collections and resources are still undergoing very visible processes of repair. Similar themes and experiences emerged from across the group, and these echoed the narratives of comparative studies about what it was like to teach and research off campus and via Zoom or MS Teams through COVID-19.⁵ Together, these colleagues’ narratives constitute a unique and valuable, if admittedly partial, record of the university’s institutional field of memory, as well as our current historical moment.

The prevalence of scaffolding on campus came to represent the primary signifier for the closure of buildings and the absence of colleagues. Respondents commented on the scaffolding in the same sentence as they described feelings of loss. The scaffolding was also a visual representation of the requirement that we adapt to a changed physical landscape if we are to learn new ways of rebuilding the intellectual and social communities that previously thrived. People talked about the need to restore and rebuild themselves and their communities alongside, or even despite, the building repair work that continued to block access to campus facilities. Their honest responses demonstrated generosity and an ethics of care for their workplace communities, even as the remediation process and its telltale network of scaffolding continues its slow march across campus.

Mobilities

If I traced lines on a map to represent my physical movement between the ‘COVID years’ of 2020 and 2021, it would not look like I travelled very far. However, my repeated back and forth movement across a small area would create physical indentations that are deep and dark and would likely tear through the surface of the paper. Just as the map can—despite what it officially records—be read for my previous journeys, the scaffolding erected on campus after the hailstorms can be read for what it obscures, hides or does not show. These examples show that there is more to forms of infrastructure—like maps, or scaffolding—than meets the eye.

Many ANU employees were already occupying a state somewhere between mobilisation and repair when COVID-19 arrived. This is because the flash flood in 2018 had caused irreparable damage to the library’s main collections and extensive damage to other parts of the university.⁶ The School of Archaeology and Anthropology, where I previously worked, had to be relocated from one ailing building to another. It took with it fragile collections of valuable fibre work from the Pacific Islands as well as a quarantine lab. Located far away from other humanities, social sciences and arts buildings in the biology precinct, it was greeted by its new closest neighbours—a family of water dragons—with uncertainty.⁷ That same year I moved across to a main administrative building with long white walls. It was a brief sojourn that was followed by another move to an idiosyncratic building on the outskirts of campus that had leaked even before the hailstorm.

The hailstorm was followed in quick succession by the fires and smoke that affected the whole east coast of Australia, including Canberra.⁸ We were already reeling and exhausted by the time the pandemic sent us all home in 2020. I have moved offices twice more since the pandemic because the first building I returned to was shut down soon after COVID-19 for hail remediation work. I have just been advised that the building we were moved to is next in line for remediation work and I will again be temporarily relocated. It feels like the scaffolding is following me.

Movement appeared as a central feature of my colleagues’ accounts, too. I heard stories about rainwater pouring down office walls while people frantically piled books into the centre of rooms; about how adept they have become at safely transferring artworks, precious artefacts and furniture on wobbly trolleys across sites through multiple trips and relocations; and about how their the neglected Monsteras and other mongrel plants from their offices had reacted to the sun as they were transited across campus to new offices. One respondent said they were frustrated at themselves for having taken their resources home during COVID-19 because, despite their frequent movement back and forth, they had still not returned them to their work office and neither had they properly organised them at home. They said that every move or relocation made it incrementally harder to resettle in their office and rebuild collegial relationships.⁹

Crisis

The global disruptions of the last few years have contributed to a burgeoning interdisciplinary academic field of ‘crisis studies’.¹⁰ Responses provided by colleagues included bureaucratic words and phrases like ‘hail remediation’. We now understand what it means to be ‘decanted’ from a building. ‘I don’t know if the worst thing’, said Respondent 1, ‘is how quickly we accommodate to and use the language [of bureaucracy]!’¹¹ To give scale to this comment, this respondent is chief university librarian and had to manage the library’s affairs when it lost over 300,000 items during the flood.¹² The word ‘chaos’ came up frequently, as did ‘desolation’.¹³ I wondered if using words drawn from urban planning and logistics to explain spaces that are no longer familiar to us might be a way to recuperate human relationships with work spaces that become meaningful through creating and sharing stories.

Respondents most often adapted their language when they were talking about changes to their personal movement patterns or about processes of institutional repair. Literal connections between the effect of crises on resources and physical feelings of loss were made by one person who said the books they once treasured for the ideas and connections escaping the pages are now just words to them.¹⁴ Displaced from their ‘right’ context, the books do not speak in the way they should to others on the bookshelf. Another said their books remain unpacked in boxes across different sites, while a third recalled seeing one office with piles of books covered in tarps.¹⁵ Many of my own books were soaked by the flood. Even though they could be read after they were professionally dried, they were changed objects, with thick pages and warped spines. I remember walking into one building during the return-to-work phase of COVID-19 to see all the communal bookshelves, couches and shared kitchen areas covered with red and white striped barricade tape in the shape of huge X’s to prohibit use.

According to Alan Latham and Jack Layton, stumbling over a new lexicon is one way people acquire knowledge about how a new environment works.¹⁶ It is part of the process by which we test out ways of relating to a changed context. Resettling physically and socially in the office also requires that new conventions of practice be developed, a process that has been difficult as our previous campus-based communities have been disrupted and remain distributed. ‘Part of the problem that comes out of our changed habits’, said Respondent 6, is exactly that ‘I write these words from home, but I would once have normally been in the office by mid-morning on a Thursday’.

Without exception, everyone I spoke to expressed sadness over the damage to University House.¹⁷ University House is a treasured symbol of contemporary collegiality and intellectual community for ANU staff and for many visitors, friends and families. It was a living history site and experience,¹⁸ as well as ‘the’ place where people across generations, disciplines and geographic areas of the university socialised and relaxed together to build different types of connections. University House was the first building to be opened on the newly founded ANU campus in 1954. The building’s age and heritage status has made its hail remediation process complex and slow, so it has been closed for several years.¹⁹ Attempts to recreate the ‘spirit’ of University House through pop-up wine bars have not succeeded in drawing people together on Friday afternoons.

Beyond the interactions facilitated by University House, the conventions of practice that respondents say they miss most are the cultural, co-constituted and often organic interactions that occur around work fridges full of lunches in odd-bod bags and mismatched containers. They include the negotiations over cleaning kitchens, morning teas and incidental corridor conversations that have been lost because of disruption arising from the physical damage and shutdowns to social spaces of collegiality.²⁰ Most respondents noted the extent to which repeated cycles of packing and unpacking have simply worn people down. Everyone seems to come into work less and go to fewer on campus events. No one wants to have to go into work specifically for morning tea when the previous convention was that morning tea drew people out of offices for a brief informal respite. Now morning tea just feels like another meeting.²¹

Respondents articulated the loss of attachment and acknowledged the need for us all to continue to rebuild the fundamentally cultural aspects of what it means to be part of a university that focuses on sociability and ideas, which are particularly important for humanities research. They were not calling for a return to the ‘good old days’ of pre-COVID-19 conventions but recognised that the new era of hybrid work and changed work conditions require new conventions. They were also aware of the point made similarly by Latham and Layton that conventions are established though the trial and error that comes with practice.²² At a macro scale, delivering on the university’s central remit to function as an incubator of knowledge relies on the capacity, energy and morale of staff individually and collectively, as well as critical infrastructure—buildings and the like—by the institution to support their activities. Interaction and community are vital components of this ‘infrastructure’, albeit ones that develop organically over time.²³

Repair

Probably because crisis changed its status from something imperceptible or hidden to something ‘in our way’, ‘infrastructure’ is one of the buzzwords that has slipped swiftly into the lexicon of academics’ lives.²⁴ Infrastructural work typically occurs as background context to the actions of everyday life, which means it is unlikely to be noticed until it breaks down and the network of relationships its smooth functioning relies upon halts. The barricade tape blocking access to bookshelves and the scaffolding on campus offer convenient examples of the infrastructure of breakage because they are so visible. We instinctively know that the scaffolding wrapped around University House is a symbol of the loss of a common space for interaction.²⁵ It is a constant reminder of the blockage to everyday sociality and human attachments that has occurred.

The work of ‘infrastructure’ scholars such as Susan Leigh Star,²⁶ Lauren Berlant,²⁷ and a more recent generation of cultural geographers²⁸ guides us to understand that infrastructure is more than just inanimate information, resources and background structures of support.²⁹ Marc Auge similarly shows how infrastructural sites or ‘non-places’—like airports—that function primarily as sites of transition generate connections and cultures that rely on complex multilayered systems.³⁰ His work offers a useful illustration of Star’s point that infrastructure is integrated within human experience and is therefore both practised and relational, and immanent rather than permanent. Developed out of cultural theory from the 1990s, infrastructure studies extends Michel de Certeau’s aim to:

make explicit the systems of operational combination (les combinatoires d ‘operations) which also compose a ‘culture’, and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the do minated everyday practices, ‘ways of operating’ or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them.³¹

This body of work seeks to show that, despite its transparency,³² infrastructure is not a neutral platform on which action takes place, but ‘is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment, inseparable from them’.³³ Berlant explains how it simultaneously records and enacts power and authority and can reproduce systemic inequalities but is ultimately pregnant with both opportunity as well as danger because of its pliability. This understanding of infrastructure can be applied to the description I offered at the outset of this essay about the map that registers the movement inherent within a period of physical immobility.

This argument is perhaps most evident in relation to the pandemic, which generated a surge of public interest in infrastructure because what was once hidden or ignored and mundane—public health services and notifications—became a key part of our everyday life. In isolation at home, people tuned in to daily reporting of COVID-19 case numbers on the television, they became involved in online debates about bureaucratic procedures for isolation of individuals and communities, and they stood in lines for hours to be tested for and vaccinated against COVID-19. Individuals used public health information and announcements as a source of connection with others. It became a way that communities were created. The political implications of infrastructure rapidly became a charged topic of everyday conversation—a kind of conjuncture. As Star had suggested two decades earlier, ‘transaction logs, email records, as well as reading things like classification systems for evidence of cultural values, conflicts, or other decisions taken in processes of construction [and repair] fall into this category’ of infrastructure.³⁴

Rebuilding the university relies similarly on recognising that infrastructure is more than the scaffolding that bars entry into our offices. It is also the boxes we use to store our books during relocation phases. It is the forms we fill in to order the boxes and to make insurance claims. The emails I received from colleagues describing their experience of the displacements of the last few years is part of this infrastructure, as is the collective archive they combine to create. These instances show that, more than anything else, infrastructure is about enabling the circulation of people and ideas as well as the practices people employ and rearrange as they learn how to use and adapt changed structures of circulation. Implicit within this process is the fact that cultures of use are themselves agile and never static. Although visible infrastructure signals a break to normal access, humans are adept at finding ways around roadblocks, and creating new systems to help them get where they want to go or make sense of something in the past.

Hope

Heightened attention to the infrastructure of our work lives, especially when it has, like scaffolding, been erected unexpectedly, may make palpable and suddenly visible that which underpins and supports or challenges and transgresses the everyday material life, including the losses incurred through the crises that created the breakdown in attachments. It is also crucial to recognise that infrastructure can mean different things to different people and groups. Respondent 7, who is master of University House, explained that, for him, seeing the scaffolding (finally) go up brought a profound sense of relief:

After more than 2.5 years of various levels of uncertainty about the repairs to University House, the scaffolding was the first visible expression of the University’s commitment to the long and complicated process of repairing University House; and its installation allowed me to write to our variously anxious members to reassure them that the repairs were really happening!³⁵

While this is certainly good news for the broader university community, I think the full impact of our recent years-in-crisis is only now starting to hit many of us. As the scaffolding continues to go up, my colleagues and I re-emerge, move and are relocated often. Our work resources and revived plants have found homes in our domestic spaces. We are only just now starting to recognise and reckon with what has been lost as well as how to repair spaces and build new cultural infrastructures that will let us get on with the work of imagining new futures in context of knowledge about the past.

Understanding, analysing, reckoning and imagining are central to the work that the humanities does; a point that brings us back around to the HRC at ANU. There are hundreds of similar humanities centres around the world.³⁶ Of the many things that humanities centres do well, and despite the anachronistic stereotype of the cloistered monkish scholar, relationship building is perhaps their most valuable activity. They approach this work in many ways depending on whether the goal is to develop official institutional collaborations, organise incredible events to inspire and inform participants and audiences, or facilitate sparks by putting together researchers who may have never met or had time to work together.

It is essential that we understand the value of this work to not just the HRC but to the larger project of rebuilding the university.³⁷ It is only possible to do this if we first recognise that the HRC is core university infrastructure that was, along with ANU Library and University House, significantly damaged from the crises of the past five years. Investing in the rebuilding of our scholarly work environment means investing in social connections and allowing time for the human connections that are at the heart of understanding, if not generating, cutting-edge intellectual work today and into the future. This, after all, is what being human is all about.

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1. 1 Walter Burley Griffin, Canberra (map), ([Melbourne]: Government Printer, c. 1916), nla.gov.au/nla.obj-230044617.

2. 2 Descriptions of each theme and an archive of historical themes is available at The Australian National University, Humanities Research Centre, ‘Past Annual Themes’, accessed 2 December 2023, hrc.cass.anu.edu.au/past-annual-themes.

3. 3 The Australian National University, ‘Acton Campus—Site Inventory’, accessed 18 June 2023, services.anu.edu.au/files/document-collection/site-university-avenue-final.pdf.

4. 4 Joshua Dowling, ‘The Hailstorm That Lashed Canberra in Late January Has Delivered a Boom in New-Car Sales as the Rest of the Market Hit the Brakes’, Drive, 1 May 2020, www.drive.com.au/news/hail-storm-delivers-windfall-to-new-car-sales-in-canberra/.

5. 5 Rhonda M. Scherman and Nancy E. Snow, ‘Defending Campus Culture against the Threat of Perennial Online Instruction in a Post-COVID-19 World’, Frontiers in Education 6 (2021), doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.647524; Kathleen Ann Godber and Denise Robyn Atkins, ‘COVID-19 Impacts on Teaching and Learning: A Collaborative Autoethnography by Two Higher Education Lecturers’, Frontiers in Education 6 (2021), doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.647524; ANU Research Committee, ‘Navigating Research in 2020—Suggestions for Research Supervisors, Early Career Researchers, and Performance Development Review Discussions’, Internal Document, May 2020.

6. 6 Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, ‘Australian Capital Territory Flash Flooding, 2018’, February 2018, Australian Government National Emergency Management Agency, accessed 18 June 2023, knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/2018-flood-act-australian-capital-territory-flash-flood/; Emily Baker, ‘Canberra Deluge Causes Extensive Flood Damage to Books in ANU’s Chifley Library’, Canberra Times, 24 April 2018, www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6022395/canberra-deluge-causes-extensive-flood-damage-to-books-in-anus-chifley-library/.

7. 7 Respondent 11, email to Kylie Message-Jones, 17 July 2023:

   Migrating offices due to unexpected weather-related damage was mildly distressing compared to the pandemic that closed the campus and forced us to work from home, especially when home was not set up to be a professional workspace. Relocating to the Banks Building from the AD Hope Building was revelatory. The move involved ‘crossing the creek’ both literally and figuratively. I was oblivious to the existence of the ‘science precinct’ and the diversity of architecture and amenities on the ‘other side’ of the ANU campus. We are habituated to familiar spaces and colleagues so this forced discovery of a new environment was initially unsettling, but ultimately welcomed. There is beauty in the crumbling Banks Building that is unlike the elegance of the Classics Museum in the AD Hope Building. I’ve developed a deep appreciation for this previously abandoned building which continues to house us and other lifeforms in its courtyard.

8. 8 Lisa Cox, ‘Smoke Cloud from Australian Summer’s Bushfires Three Times Larger Than Anything Previously Recorded’, Guardian, 3 November 2020, www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/03/smoke-cloud-from-australian-summers-bushfires-three-times-larger-than-anything-previously-recorded; Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, ‘Bushfires—Black Summer’, February 2020, Australian Government National Emergency Management Agency, accessed 18 June, knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/black-summer-bushfires-act-2020/.

9. 9 Respondent 5, email to Kylie Message-Jones, 1 June 2023:

   It made me reflect on research, teaching and the importance of place. In early 2022 it felt like there was a lot of positive energy (despite the chaos of coming back to campus with Covid waves) to re-establish the importance of research and teaching happening in a community that came together physically in shared places. I had conversations with people that happened spontaneously, ideas were shared and it was easier to check in with people about what they were doing and where interests might align without the formality of email or a planned zoom meeting. Then suddenly it was like this was all cut off again—we were sent back home (literally for some of us who were given no alternative offices), our students were scattered across numerous buildings and even after everything was finished it was like that energy to rebuild had dissipated. Even with the work finished the buildings seem to have stayed empty, people have retreated to their home offices and the serendipity of informal chats with colleagues and students seems to be lost again.

10. 10 Annika Bergman-Rosamond, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Mo Hamza, Jeff Hearn, Vasna Ramasar and Helle Rydstrom, ‘The Case for Interdisciplinary Crisis Studies’, Global Discourse 12, no. 3–4 (2020): 465–86, doi.org/10.1332/204378920X15802967811683; Janet Roitman, ‘Crisis’, Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 1 (n.d.), accessed 18 June 2023, www.politicalconcepts.org/roitman-crisis/.

11. 11 Respondent 1:

    Oh heavens the bureaucratic language used across ANU about disasters and recovery is gobsmacking. I don’t know if the worst thing is how quickly we accommodate to and use the language! … We have learnt about the intricacies of insurance claims, created stronger links with academics and rebuilt ourselves. The concept of being custodian for collections for current and future scholars remains at the core of our being—but we think about it in different ways.

12. 12 Respondent 1:

    [Since 2018, the ANU Library has suffered] hail, flood, bushfires, smoke, an electrical fire in Hancock library, water pouring into the Art and Music library over weekends, water in the basement in Menzies (regularly and running down the walls in Menzies before the first roof replacement), water running into the Underhill archives repository, the fire outside DA Brown where archives are stored—with a surprising number of these events happening on weekends. Not counting the water that has until a month ago come in regularly through the temporary arrangements for the Chifley roof. Mould and damage are the features of our lives … and then there was COVID-19. Perhaps the flood set the tone for a huge sense of loss.

13. 13 Respondent 2, email to Kylie Message-Jones, 1 June 2023:

    I used to have obsessively organised bookshelves but something about the move from AD Hope to Banks and then a move within Banks and then the eviction from ANU for much of the pandemic has left me utterly unmotivated to reorganise my shelves. My books are chaotic, overflowing and disarranged—I used to keep all my work books at work, but now more of them are at home since my partner built me new shelves during 2020.

14. 14 Respondent 3, email to Kylie Message-Jones, 31 May 2023:

    Multiple displacements through Covid and hail have had a tough effect on me and my ‘things’. With each pack and unpack, I lose an attachment as they—and I—are forced to define again and again what it means to belong. New shelves, new walls, new desks and new boxes, me and my ‘things’ become less attached to each other so that the books I once treasured are now just words, and the fragile things carefully made and gifted to me take on cracks and colour. I don’t expect these things to be replaced or for value to suddenly emerge again.

15. 15 Respondent 4, email to Kylie Message-Jones, 6 June 2023:

    When I first arrived [at] ANU to start my PhD at the beginning of March 2020, the RWB [Roland Wilson Building] looked a bit of a fright. A ceiling window had been destroyed right outside my shared office by the hail, there were piles of books covered in tarp, and not many people were around. Of course, then COVID hit and I didn’t get back into that office for over 2 years. By then everything was covered in a thick layer of dust and it looked even more desolate.

16. 16 Alan Latham and Jack Layton, ‘Social Infrastructure and the Public Life of Cities: Studying Urban Sociality and Public Spaces’, Geography Compass 13, no. 7 (2019), doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12444.

17. 17 Respondent 12, email to Kylie Message-Jones, 23 July 2023:

    One outcome of the hail storm and hail damage repair was the cancellation of the HRC Sculpture Walk program. These walks had been offered by a former Canberra School of Art director and member of the University Public Art Committee for HRC Fellows visiting from overseas and interstate, interested colleagues and others. They presented an opportunity to talk with our visitors about the foundation of ANU in 1946 and the farsighted policies in the 1950s which established the university’s important collection of Australian art, paintings, prints and drawings. The collection now includes the site-specific sculptures commissioned for the new buildings on the university campus. [The] HRC Sculpture Walk [program] involved viewing a small number of sculptures selected from the 75+ total collection of sculptures on campus. Initially focused around the SRW [Sir Roland Wilson] building precinct, the walks included University House (still closed for repair in 2023) and provided information about the sculptor, the making process and materials.

18. 18 Respondent 6, email to Kylie Message-Jones, 1 June 2023: ‘Campus has become shabby and neglected. In the absence of University House, there has been no obvious place … we all have a lot of work to do.’

19. 19 A hidden ‘history’ of this institutional phase also includes some of the university’s 50+ collections. Respondent 13, ANU Senior Collections Adviser, from the Research and Innovation Portfolio, commented that beyond the visible damage and repair to buildings was the urgent work that arose for relocating and repackaging decades of deposited archaeological material and PhD and masters research collections, in addition to Australian and Pacific cultural material. The extensive University House collection, for example, has been moved several times post hailstorm, however the collections team is only now, in August 2023, preparing to catalogue, sort and assess it for damage.

20. 20 Respondent 3:

    The thing I perhaps miss the most is the hallway full of chatter and the fridge stocked with someone’s milk and someone else’s lunchboxes. These things can’t just emerge again—they must begin the long journey of being made and remade again for new beginnings and new communities. How do we remediate these things, like the roofs, ceilings and carpets so desperate for attention?

21. 21 Claire Wright and Simon Ville, ‘The University Tea Room: Informal Public Spaces as Ideas Incubators’, History Australia 15, no. 2 (2018): 236–54, doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2018.1443701.

22. 22 Latham and Layton, ‘Social Infrastructure’.

23. 23 Indeed, the university’s vision statement includes ideas about ‘connecting talented people’, see The Australian National University, ‘About’, accessed 2 December 2023, www.anu.edu.au/about.

24. 24 It is also important to understand that the physical world of the university under repair does not imply a complete absence of sociality. The environment may be seen as a non-social infrastructure by the academics and students who previously used it; however, for construction workers, engineers and facilities and services staff, it constitutes a new social infrastructure. However, because social infrastructure is typically defined as a site that is ‘experienced as inclusive and welcoming’—that invites people into the public realm—it does not apply to a university campus covered in scaffolding. Latham and Layton, ‘Social Infrastructure’.

25. 25 The association of scaffolding with the breakdown of infrastructure and the absence of progress rather than as a characteristic of repair is perhaps most evident in New York City. Even though it is supposed to be temporary, scaffolding in that city symbolises stasis. Each year the total linear footage of scaffolding there increases. There is currently 2,047,356 total linear feet of scaffolding, which has been up for an average of 482 days, see City of New York, ‘Active Sidewalk Shed Permits’ (map), accessed 18 June 2023, www.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/sidewalk-shed-map.html.

26. 26 Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3 (1999): 377–91, doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326.

27. 27 Lauren Berlant, ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393–419, doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989.

28. 28 Theresa Enright and Nathan Olmstead, ‘The Potential Politics of the Porous City’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41 no. 2 (2023): 295–309, doi.org/10.1177/02637758231170635.

29. 29 Lisa Krieg Maan Barua and Josh Fisher, ‘Ecologizing Infrastructure: Infrastructural Ecologies’, Society and Space, 30 November 2020, www.societyandspace.org/forums/ecologizing-infrastructure-infrastructural-ecologies.

30. 30 Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995).

31. 31 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xii.

32. 32 This transparency is an outcome of habit and familiarity: ‘For example, a library, as a social infrastructure, is embedded within networks of book distribution and recognisable relationships of lending and borrowing … each time you borrow a book, there is no need to renegotiate the terms of the loan’, in Latham and Layton ‘Social Infrastructure’, 3.

33. 33 Star, ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’, 377.

34. 34 Ibid., 387–88. COVID-19 also led to greater awareness of the role of digital infrastructure in our everyday lives. Respondent 5 reflected that ‘so many times I said: “imagine the pandemic and lockdowns without the internet”. I almost couldn’t imagine it.’

35. 35 Respondent 7, email to Kylie Message-Jones, 5 June 2023.

36. 36 One measure is that there are over 300 institutional members of the Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centres alone. A handful are based in Australia. See Consortium of Humanities Institutes and Centres, Annual Report 2022–2023, 20 June 2023, chcinetwork.org/news/annual-report-2022-23.

37. 37 Not least because ANU is Australia’s most HASS (humanities, arts and social sciences) dominant university, according to the most recent Australian Research Council Excellence in Research Australia exercise (2018), which reported ANU as having the highest distribution of HASS FTE (full-time equivalent load) across the Group of Eight universities in fields of research 16 and 18–22. ANU is around 32.1 per cent HASS FTE, and the next highest is the University of Melbourne and University of Sydney at 20–21 per cent. In the whole sector, the only universities with a greater percentage of researchers in HASS disciplines were the Australian Catholic University (32.5 per cent, primarily in philosophy/religion) and University of Divinity (100 per cent). The lowest in the sector was the University of Queensland at 10 per cent. See Australian Government, ‘Diversity within Institutions’, accessed 18 June, dataportal.arc.gov.au/ERA/NationalReport/2018/pages/section1/diversity-within-institutions/.