1st Edition
Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19 Displacements and Disruptions
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.
Introduction
Displacements, Disruptions and Distress: An Introduction to Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19
Bandana Purkayastha, Josephine Beoku-Betts, Melanie Heath, and Akosua K. Darkwah
Part I: Disruptions
Introduction
Disruptions: Seismic Work and Life Shifts
Akosua K. Darkwah
1. The Pandemic and Our Entangled Lives: Experiencing the Many Relations of Ruling
Maitrayee Chaudhuri, Deepali Aparajita Dungdung, Dinesh Rajak, and Rituparna Patgiri
2. The Inequality the Pandemic Unveils: Teaching and Learning in the Times of COVID
Esther Hernández-Medina and Malak Afaneh
3. Disruption and Silence: Making Sense of Troubled Times Through Autoethnographic Writing
Joanne Yoo
4. "Network Problems": An Autoethnographic Reflection of the Challenges of Undergraduate Education in Ghana in the Midst of a Global Pandemic
Geraldine Asiwome Adiku
5. Navigating Empowerment and Activism in the Ivory Tower: A Co-autoethnography Gives Voice to Feminist Identity in a Criminal Justice Program
Ziwei Qi, April Terry, and Tamara J. Lynn
6. Writing on Self, Together: Collective Autoethnography as Praxis of Solidarity and Collective Care during the Pandemic
Manisha Desai, Rianka Roy, Asmita Aasavari, Ruth M. Hernandez-Rios, and Koyel Khan
7. Labor Transformations in the Academy under COVID-19 Through the Lens of Intersectional Feminism: A Canadian Duoethnography
Evangelia Tastsoglou and Shiva Nourpanah
Part II: Distress
Introduction
Distress: Personal Trauma and Institutionalized Inequalities
Melanie Heath
8. Valuing a Feminist Ethics of Care in Pandemic Times
Michelle Forrest
9. A Clinical Account of Breast Cancer Amid COVID-19
Mariam Seedat-Khan
10. Gendered Life Transitions and the Blurring of Work-Family Boundaries during COVID-19
Medora W. Barnes
11. Trying My Best to Be My Badass Self: Parenting, Homeschooling, and Leading a Professional Feminist Academic Organization Amid a Pandemic
Barret Katuna
12. Invoking Abuelita Epistemologies for Academic Transformation in the Coronavirus Age: Autoethnographic Reflections from a Motherscholar Collective
Erica Edwards, Sarah Robert, Christina DeNicola, Sandra Gonzales, and Min Yu
13. An Autoethnography from a Student and Underpaid Employee
Maddison Berlinghoff
14. Black Women, Work, and COVID-19: Reflections on Navigating Graduate School, Work, Motherhood and Relationships During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Alexis Grant-Panting, Vanessa Ellison, and Celeste Graham
15. On the Margins of Hyperinvisibility and Hypervisibility: The Paradox of Being an Asian American During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Kim-Phuong Truong-Vu
Part III: Displacements
Introduction
Displacements: Transnational Realities and Splintered Lives
Josephine Beoku-Betts
16. One Virus, Two Worlds: A Taiwanese Queer Stranger’s "World"-Traveling and Loving in the COVID U.S.
Ying-Chao Kao
17. Transnational Families, Welfare States, and Marriage Rules in the Time of COVID-19
Melanie Heath
18. COVID-19: Lived Realities, Reflections, and Analysis
Shobha Hamal Gurung
19. Knitting an Autoethnography
Edelweiss Murillo Lafuente
20. Disorientation, Disbelief, Distance
Elina Oinas
21. "Salaam, Hamvatan-e Aziz": Solidarity in the Time of Corona
Kristin Soraya Batmanghelichi
22. (At) Home in Crisis
Nazanin Shahrokni
Conclusion: Reflections on the Pandemic from a Southern Feminist Scholar
Akosua K. Darkwah
Postscript: The Pandemic World in 2021
Biography
Melanie Heath is Associate Professor of Sociology at McMaster University. President, Research Committee on Women, Gender, and Society, International Sociological Association.
Akosua K. Darkwah is Associate Professor of Sociology and current chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana. Managing editor, Ghana Journal of Sociology and Anthropology.
Josephine Beoku-Betts is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology at Florida Atlantic University. Past President, Sociologists for Women in Society.
Bandana Purkayastha is Professor of Sociology and Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut. Executive Committee Member, International Sociological Association.
