The Liminality of Multinational Muslim MotherScholaring during COVID-19: A Feminist Collaborative Autoethnography

Transformative Collaborations

“…The lesson for institutions seeking to be truly welcoming to motherscholars is to encourage their employees to show up confident – and unapologetic – about their inextricably entangled professional and personal identities, and do so in a comprehensive, empathetic, and visible way. Transparency in policies that support mothering scholars during the pandemic can also help highlight inequities that pre-exist the pandemic and are often accepted as individual failures rather than systemic shortcomings (Azim & Salem, in press; Lim et al, in press).…”

“…Indeed, the concept of motherscholar is used to highlight how women negotiate their various roles and intersecting identities as mothers and academics while navigating the gendered space of academia (Lapayese, 2012). While the challenges of parenting within the academy impact motherscholars in ways that make their experiences unique from both women without children and fathers working in higher education (Raddon, 2002), motherscholars' lives are further shaped by the oppressions and privileges they experience based on their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, age, and career and employment status (Azim & Salem, in press; Matias, 2011). For example, while the division of care work in queer families is often more equitable than in heterosexual households (e.g., Goldberg et al, 2012), externally imposed gendered norms and increased care expectations for the gestational parent (e.g., Goldberg et al, 2007) shape lesbian motherscholars' experiences in ways that are both similar to and different from their heterosexual counterparts (Pennell et al, in press).…”

How do you manage? An auto-ethnographic inquiry into contemporary maternal labor

“…The subjective experience of motherhood has gained increasing visibility in feminist writing since the 1970s mainly with Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (Rich, 1976) and Ann Oakley's From Here to Maternity (Oakley, 2018(Oakley, [1979), and also through literary forms such as memoirs, autobiographies and novels (Skott-Myhre et al, 2012;Polkey, 1999;Quiney, 2007). Confessional writing and the use of autoethnographic methodology or first-person accounts have become prevalent in the academic field (Hager, 2015), especially during the COVID-19 pandemic (Rania et al, 2022;Azim and Salem, 2022;Schriever, 2021). Still, "(W)e know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood."…”

Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic: documenting suffering and care in conditions of physical isolation and uncertainty

“…Turner (1980) also defined this space as existing 'betwixt and between'-a going back and forth between the known and unknown (Beech 2011), and often associated with uncertainty, ambiguity and transformation. The concept of the liminal period has been applied in the health field where considerable research has been conducted (Azim and Salem 2022;Kralik, Visentin, and van Loon 2006). Liminality has particular relevance in the context of COVID-19, characterised by contested information and medical uncertainty: especially in relation to issues of how best to protect populations from infection/reinfection, the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection and how to treat long COVID symptoms (Howell 2022).…”