This special issue of Networking Knowledge was initially planned during the end of summer 2020, relatively early in the pandemic. At the time it was assumed that due to the time-consuming nature of academic publishing, any research released on the lockdown period would need to take a retrospective role, looking back at the traumatic, but temporary upheaval of 2020 from the relative safety of a slowly recovering world. But as the pandemic continued, it became clear that this issue would arrive long before anything had returned to normal, into a context in which educational and cultural institutions have been forever transformed by the necessity for physical distance.