Foreign women in academia: Double‐strangers between productivity, marginalization and resistance

109

This article is a personal reflection of how the current COVID‐19 pandemic affects our working lives and wellbeing, as single female academics who live alone in the UK. We offer a dialogue of our daily lives of being confined at home with lockdown measures extended. In particular, we focus on the experience of, and coping with, isolation and loneliness. Is isolation making us more socially connected? Through ‘virtual’ working and changing learning environments for us as teachers and learners, we explore changes in our working life and subsequent changes in the domestic environment. By capturing our lived experiences, we create an intellectual and safe space to voice our emotional struggles — as ‘invisible’ isolated individuals containing and consuming loneliness on our own. We foster alternative conversations as to how we might engender new perspectives from single female academics to combat social isolation in the workplace.

Section: Beginningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a ‘virtual’ world: Social isolation and struggles during the COVID‐19 pandemic as single women living alone

Gao

Sai

2020

109

“…First, this research is innovative due to its intersectional perspective in European HEI. Research on HEI included an intersectional perspective when ethnicity or race was defined in terms of international women (Sang & Calvard, 2019; Strauβ & Boncori, 2020). This article investigates the experiences of women part of the majority and minority groups in Belgium.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday sexism and racism in the ivory tower: The experiences of early career researchers on the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the academic workplace

Bourabain

2020

The academic workplace is often described as a place of merit and equal opportunities. However, research shows a leaky pipeline where the share of women and people of color decreases in the higher echelons of academia. Explanations are often structural, referring to the access barriers women are confronted with, such as hiring and recruitment. This research investigates what goes wrong in the early phases of a female academic's career. From an intersectional perspective, I study the experiences with everyday sexism and racism of PhD and postdoctoral researchers across disciplines. After conducting 50 in‐depth interviews, four processes are discovered: smokescreen of equality, everyday cloning, patronization, and paternalism.

“…My temporal or precariat ontology is inevitably associated with a lack of sense of security or stability. Should I wish to tackle this temporality and precariousness, I should first “fit” the neoliberal model (Strauβ & Boncori, 2020) or the Western typology of work and “ideal” worker (Acker, 2006). I should “lean in” harder (Sandberg, 2013) to get an opportunity that seeks in the future to provide more sense of stability and security.…”

Section: The West: Gender Race and Precariousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Management and organization scholars recently focused on examining various intersecting identities such as gender, race, and power (Meléndez & Özkazanç‐Pan, 2020); ethnicity, gender, and nationality (Opara et al, 2020); gender and foreignness (Strauβ & Boncori, 2020); and gender and precarity (Steinþórsdóttir, Smidt, Pétursdóttir, Einarsdóttir, & Le Feuvre, 2019). In sharing my fragmented experience, I mirror Rodriguez, Holvino, Fletcher, and Nkomo (2016) in moving beyond the favored triumvirate of gender, race, and class.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Marginalized to double marginalized: My mutational intersectionality between the East and the West

Abdellatif

2020

Intersectionality allows better understanding of the differences between individuals' experiences. In this article, I use intersectionality to explore how my lived experience of marginalization is different from one context to another. I reflect on how the nature of intersectionality and the intensity of oppression are altered by context. Grounded in a brief reflection of my fragmented experience in two different contexts, I explore how my identities and their intersection “mutate” from the Egyptian context to the UK context. Then, I reflect on how the intensity of oppression changed with this alteration in my intersectionality. In contextualizing my intersectional experience, first I problematize viewing intersectionality as a fixed acontextual ontology. Second, as a student immigrant and racialized minority in the United Kingdom, I seek to extend intersectionality and move beyond the traditional categories of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality to include precarity as a pivotal social category that amplifies the intensity of oppression and marginalization, especially when intersected with race and gender. Finally, in sharing my reflection as a Middle Eastern woman, I contribute my unique experiences into the conversation, and a voice that has been muted, invisibled, marginalized, and excluded from the literature.