Background: The COVID-19 global pandemic, and the policies created to respond to it, has had profound and widespread impacts. We -three early career physiotherapist academics aspiring to emancipatory physiotherapy practice -noticed both common and divergent experiences amid the impacts of the initial pandemic response. Aim: To explore the professional contexts in which we operate as physiotherapist academics through an analysis of our COVID-19 pandemic-related experiences. Methods: We used a professional practice analytic framework to systematically explore our individual and collective experiences. The analytic framework consists of three lenses (accountability, ethics, and professional-as-worker), each of which is considered through three questions. Results: The analysis revealed the instability of our working conditions. Among us, there were experiences of the pandemic inducing unmanageable workloads and also experiences of the pandemic providing reprieve. We found that our accountability to departments and funders competed for our professional resources with our ethics of providing quality services. The combination of accountability obligations and ethics commitments often overwhelmed our capacities to sustainably maintain well-being. Caregiver status was an important characteristic determining whether the professional context improved or deteriorated in the early pandemic phase. Conclusion: This analysis can help inform essential changes to professional and academic institutions during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.