Catching a glimpse: Corona‐life and its micro‐politics in academia

As the COVID‐19 pandemic unfolds, a growing body of international literature is analyzing the effects of the pandemic on academic labor and, specifically, on gender inequalities in academia. In that literature, much attention has been devoted to comparing the unequal impacts of COVID‐19 on the research activities of women and men, with studies demonstrating that women's research productivity has been disproportionately disrupted, in ways that are likely to have detrimental effects in the short‐ and long‐term. In this paper, I discuss that emerging literature on gender inequalities in pandemic academic productivity. I reflect on the questions asked, the issues centered and the assumptions made within this literature, devoting particular attention to how authors conceptualize academic labor and productivity, on one hand, and gender, on the other. I show that this literature makes major contributions to exposing old and new gender inequalities in academia, but argue that it also risks reproducing some problematic assumptions about gender and about academic work. Discussing those assumptions and their effects, I identify some important questions for us to consider as we expand this literature and deepen our understanding of the complex gendered effects of COVID‐19 on academic labor.

Section: The Impacts Of Covid‐19 On Gendered Inequalities In Academic Labormentioning

confidence: 99%

Researching gender inequalities in academic labor during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Avoiding common problems and asking different questions

Pereira

2021

“…question, triggered by specific uncertain circumstances (Alvesson, Ashcraft, & Thomas, 2008) of the pandemic, has caused us anxiety and become even more difficult to answer than before. We find it hard to separate those roles, and we find it even harder to separate our desires from socially imposed duties (see also Plotnikof et al, 2020). Although in the texts above we write as junior academics and mothers, we do not write of motherhood as a separation from all other women, non-mothers.…”

Section: Breathingmentioning

confidence: 98%

Writing multi‐vocal intersectionality in times of crisis

Einola

Elkina

Gao

et al. 2020

Self Cite

This article is a multi-vocal account, a form of writing differently, which captures our changing lives and livelihoods under the present global health crisis. Through the process of writing, we create a safe space to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic exposes our gendered, intersectional lives. Our writing gives voice to suppressed thoughts and embodied affects as they surface in relation to entrenched structural inequalities where we witness the marginalization of intersectional difference, in our case women, the feminine, and race in academia and neoliberal society. By rendering visible the structural inequalities that have become amplified during the pandemic, and the ways in which these inequalities have affected our everyday lives, we are able to give witness to intersectional differences. Our multi-vocal embodied text is offered as an emancipatory, affective mobilization of our lives, encompassing feelings of grief, loss, fear, anger, frustration, and vulnerability. This collective piece of writing gives rise to solidarity in a crisis-stricken world where we choose to live with hope.

“…Yet, this time it was not just for the sake of an academic publication but also of a corporeal need to make sense of a worldwide crisis, which had started taking unconceivable social dimensions. She was exchanging more than ever with colleagues online to share struggles, she participated in collaborative projects discussing emerging social and gendered inequalities that were skyrocketing under the pandemic (e.g., Plotnikof et al, 2020), as well as engaged even more with creative writing practices by integrating in her academic writing, verses and poems that were triggered in the wake of the quarantine. Overall, her immense need to make sense of how her embodied complexities and contradictions seemed to now intermingle (virtually) with these of others, under this global crisis, led her more than ever to explore ways of combining embodied academic writing, with poetry and art‐making.…”

Section: Developing the Prose Through Artistic Connections In Past Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Capturing these elements involved engaging in a writing understood ‘not as‐production, but in production’ (Clarke et al, 2020, p. 52), which by combining provocative political art performance, poetry and creative prose, in the context of virtual connections, allowed them to develop an amalgam of experiences of vulnerability and diversity, whose voice has a social and political bearing (Li & Prasad, 2018; van Amsterdam & van Eck, 2019), which aspires to also speak of other bodies urgently seeking expression in a neoliberal world of pandemic. It also enabled them to use their personal experiences to converse with other voices, who had found their own creative (virtual) ways of connecting through writing, in an isolated world of pandemic (e.g., Boncori, 2020; Gao & Sai, 2020; Plotnikof et al, 2020).…”

Section: Reflecting On the Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

(Dis)embodied encounters between art and academic writing amid a pandemic

Mandalaki

Daou²

2020

Self Cite

The current account recounts the authors’ artistic virtual interactions during the COVID‐19 period of quarantine to discuss how connections between art, writing, humans’ embodied struggles and technologies can enable forms of feminist writing, as a cyborg practice, which have the political potential to meaningfully voice embodied experiences of inter‐sectionality and vulnerability that remain increasingly under‐expressed, in a neoliberal world of pandemic. Presented in a creative prose, whereby theory interweaves with artistic performances, poetry and extracts of the authors’ virtual exchanges, this account reflects how hybrid, non‐conventional, cyborg writing explorations can connect different bodies in an academic text even when these bodies are physically kept apart. By invoking hybridity that counters the masculine conventions of academic writing, this text aspires to produce academic knowledge that writes and speaks of embodied experiences of othering that urgently seek expression under the COVID‐19 pandemic. The current account builds on the burgeoning stream of organizational literature on writing differently and especially feminist forms of writing integrating genre‐blurring prose, poetry and art‐based research.