ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses feminist subversions of academic productivity of the individual and wellbeing through prioritising participatory collectivity during the initial lockdown period of COVID-19 in 2020. Focusing on a project by #FEAS (Feminist Educators Against Sexism) that involved three international online Zoom zine-making workshops, the chapter addresses the lack of connectivity experienced in videoconferencing and demonstrates how we developed a method for working together while being apart. Shared connection is made possible by enacting a feminist pause using embodied creative methods. Harnessing Project P: The Personal, Political, Practical as a conceptual feminist framework, the chapter describes how three embodied response scores were developed and enacted for bringing women academics together to actively pause amid the panic of a global pandemic. It offers a generative interruption to the increased ‘pivot’ pressure applied by neoliberal ‘business as usual’ academic expectations. In generating a collective pause that attends to productivity otherwise, the chapter engages with, and offers a practical response to the increased isolation and impossibly complex (un)routines of academic work experienced by women (at home) online. With videoconferencing, the shape of sexism within higher education is changing: personal and professional blurs in the domestic work sphere.
