ABSTRACT

Global Feminist Autoethnographies bears witness to our displacements, disruptions, and distress as tenured faculty, faculty on temporary contracts, graduate students, and people connected to academia during COVID-19.

The authors document their experiences arising within academia and beyond it, gathering narratives from across the globe—Australia, Canada, Ghana, Finland, India, Norway, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States along with transnational engagements with Bolivia, Iran, Nepal, and Taiwan. In an era where the older rules about work and family related to our survival, wellbeing, and dignity are rapidly being transformed, this book shows that distress and traumas are emerging and deepening across the divides within and between the global North and South, depending on the intersecting structures that have affected each of us. It documents our distress and trauma and how we have worked to lift each other up amidst severe precarities.

A global co-written project, this book shows how we are moving to decolonize our scholarship. It will be of interest to an interdisciplinary array of scholars in the areas of intersectionality, gender, family, race, sexuality, migration, and global and transnational sociology.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction: Displacements, disruptions, and distress

An introduction to global feminist autoethnographies during COVID-19

part I|93 pages

Disruptions

chapter |3 pages

Introduction to Part 1

Disruptions: seismic work and life shifts

chapter Chapter 1|15 pages

The pandemic and our entangled lives

Experiencing the many relations of ruling

chapter Chapter 2|15 pages

The inequality the pandemic unveils

Teaching and learning in the times of COVID

chapter Chapter 3|10 pages

Disruption and silence

Making sense of troubled times through autoethnographic writing

chapter Chapter 4|12 pages

“Network problems”

An autoethnographic reflection of the challenges of undergraduate education in Ghana in the midst of a global pandemic

chapter Chapter 5|12 pages

Navigating empowerment and activism in the ivory tower

A co-autoethnography gives voice to feminist identity in a criminal justice program

chapter Chapter 6|11 pages

Writing on self, together

Collective autoethnography as praxis of solidarity and collective care during the pandemic

part II|98 pages

Distress

chapter |2 pages

Introduction to Part 2

Distress: personal trauma and institutionalized inequalities

chapter Chapter 11|12 pages

Trying my best to be my badass self

Parenting, homeschooling, and leading a professional feminist academic organization amid a pandemic

chapter Chapter 12|14 pages

Invoking abuelita epistemologies for academic transformation in the coronavirus age

Autoethnographic reflections from a motherscholar collective

chapter Chapter 14|14 pages

Black women, work, and COVID-19

Reflections on navigating graduate school, work, motherhood, and relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic

chapter Chapter 15|12 pages

On the margins of hyperinvisibility and hypervisibility

The paradox of being an Asian-American during the COVID-19 pandemic

part III|105 pages

Displacements

chapter |3 pages

Introduction to Part 3

Displacements: transnational realities and splintered lives

chapter Chapter 16|14 pages

One virus, two worlds

A Taiwanese queer stranger's “world”-traveling and loving in the COVID U.S.

chapter Chapter 18|10 pages

COVID-19

Lived realities, reflections, and analysis

chapter Chapter 19|13 pages

Knitting an autoethnography

chapter Chapter 20|12 pages

Disorientation, disbelief, distance

chapter Chapter 21|11 pages

“Salaam, Hamvatan-e Aziz”

Solidarity in the time of corona

chapter Chapter 22|15 pages

(At) Home in crisis