The well-being of university employees in the US, UK and Italy. Legal and discursive implications

The impact of Covid-19 on Western societies has definitely and consistently affected the education field. During the early waves, school-age children and university students alike were forced to stay home, and lessons were delivered online. The academic and administrative staff were also thus heavily affected in their daily routines, teaching methods and communicative styles. Focusing on the academia in particular, the medical and legal specialized languages will be studied here in combination, within the very special context of universities, which are to be considered ‘citadels’ in their own right, especially in societies where they are organized in campus-style. Material and methods Specifically, this reflection would like to explore the measures put into place by a sample of large, world-renowned universities in English-speaking countries and in Italy to tackle the well-being of their employees. University website sections dedicated to these issues will thus be analysed. Concentrating on the staff in particular – though, of course, bearing in mind the relevance of the student component that is fundamental in and for any university – is believed to prove significant when intersecting discourses pertaining to health / well-being and labour law, in academic contexts. A Critical Discourse Studies approach, based on analyses of domain-specific genres and languages, will be adopted to interpret the findings. Objectives Research questions can be formulated as: ‘how has a specific university addressed the physical and mental well-being of its employs during and after the Covid-19 pandemic?’ and ‘what measures and provisions have been taken and made in practical terms?’ Particular attention will be paid to psychological well-being, to check whether it has been included in the discourse and, in case, in what ways. Expected results and relevance The study will hopefully contribute to report on the discursive representations of the pandemic from a legal perspective, and in a specific work setting. Select bibliography Bhatia, V. K. 2018. Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Practice. London:Taylor & Francis. Flowerdew, J., Richardson, J.E. 2018 (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Gaglione, C., Purificato, I., Rymkevich, O. P. 2020. COVID-19 and Labour Law: Italy. Italian Labour Law E-Journal, 13(1S). https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1561-8048/10767. Hamouche, S. 2021. Human resource management and the COVID-19 crisis: implications, challenges, opportunities, and future organizational directions. Journal of Management & Organization (2021). https://doi.org/10.1017/jmo.2021.15. Watermeyer, R. et al. 2021. ‘Pandemia’: a reckoning of UK universities’ corporate response to COVID-19 and its academic fallout. British Journal of Sociology of Education 42(5-6), pp. 651-666. Wodak, R., Meyer, M. (eds) 2015. Methods of Critical Discourse Studies. 3rd ed. London: SAGE.