The Poetry of the Pandemic

This autoethnographic essay is a co-constructed endeavour that documents how we—a MotherScholar and a Black Woman scholar—both used poetic inquiry as feminist methodology (Faulkner) in order to respond to and find reprieve from the emotional gamut we each experienced during COVID-19. Though not professional poets, we value the craft of poetry and found it most suitable to capture the emotional labour of performing our caregiving responsibilities as mother and grandmother in our respective home spaces while trying to maintain our (virtual) workloads in institutes of higher education. Poetry was an opportunity for us to make sense of our changing identities and unpredictable emotions while being constantly bombarded with experiences and roles we never asked for or ever anticipated confronting—at home or work.The poems vary in content and form in an attempt to capture the diversity of experiences we each encountered while attempting to weather the same storm but in different boats. Collectively, the poems speak to the competing messages of comfort and confusion we each received during this volatile and traumatic time. By sharing our lived experiences, we invite others to bear witness to our COVID-19 realities of being forced to care for everyone and everything while still trying to care for ourselves, and we hope that readers find solace in a shared story, adopt this selfinquiry method as a form of self-care, and/or are prompted to check on any and all of the mothers that are just trying to survive COVID-19.When home becomes your officeWhen work invades your kitchenWhen you teach other people’s children while your own children sleep twenty feet awayWhen online #crisisschooling is forcing you to choose between teaching your daughter math or being a good momWhen the incessant, unmistakable ding of emails demanding accountability for your time, your whereabouts, your productivity bombards your screen—What are you doing?! Show me! Count it up.Tally it.Tally it again in a different format.Tally due today!New tally in a different format for a different reason due tomorrow!!Convince me you are doing your job!!!Your care for your children better not be getting in your way!—while you try to focus on the comforting hum of students learning from youonline in another open tabWhen COVID-19 forces a nation to observe a stay-at-home order, when can a MotherScholar find her own space among the unsolicited, unreasonable, and unimaginable expectation to become all things, to all people, at all timesWhen the pandemic tries to tell you that you CAN’T be a mother and a scholar in the same space, at the same timeWhen?!Perhaps……in the stolen moments between feeding children and contributing in Zoom meetings,…in the margins of a work journal borrowed from her children’s bag of returned school supplies,Perhaps ……in the form of a poem. (Burrow

Art Looking within MotherScholarhood: Art Elicitation for Self-Reflections and Sense Making

This study continues the ongoing collaborative autoethnographic, arts-based scholarship of three MotherScholars (Burrow et al.). This study presents both the critical self-reflections resulting from and advocacy for the process of art elicitation (Burrow and Burrow), which is a valid and effective methodology to allow MotherScholars a vital pause for valuable personal self-interrogation and renewed clarity within their scholarship. Like our previous research, this study reaffirms that MotherScholars need space and time to reflect on the fluidity and flexibility of their personal-professional identity as it is affected by natural life changes (e.g., children leaving home for college), unexpected transitions (e.g., divorce), and trauma (e.g., global pandemics). The necessity to find malleability in the MotherScholar identity can help women in academia name what they need and recognize what they are already uniquely suited to handle

Quarantine Mothering and Working at Home: How Institutions of Higher Education Supported (or Failed to Support) Academic Mothers

This mixed methods study explores whether and how explicit policies, implicit practices, and internal communication from university administrators about aca-demic mothers’ work lives and expectations were impacted by the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine protocols. As this was a large study focussing on university policies addressing the presence of children on campus and the ways in which their enforcement or nonenforcement affected the personal and professional lives of faculty, we used purposive sampling (Palys) and snowball sampling (Patton) to distribute a survey in academic social media groups and to professional organization listservs (Palys). Among other things, the survey asked participants to report how well they thought their university was handling the COVID-19 pandemic and invited them to participate in an in-depth interview. As a result of the survey responses, we subsequently interviewed nineteen academic mothers from a range of academic disciplines, ages, and types of institutions, until we reached theoretical saturation (Strauss and Corbin). The semi-structured interview protocol included questions about the impact of COVID-19-related policies, practices, and messaging regarding children on participants’ job satisfaction, mental and physical health, as well as work-life balance. We used open and axial coding (Strauss and Corbin) and the constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss) to analyze the data. We then triangulated the data by comparing interview and survey findings, engaging multiple researchers in the analysis, and conducting peer debriefings (Denzin and Lincoln; Lincoln and Guba). Findings highlight institutional policies and practices that serve or fail to serve faculty in terms of supporting their professional advancement in teaching, research, and service

The Skits, Sketches, and Stories of MotherScholars

“MotherScholars” are those who creatively weave their maternal identities into their scholarly spaces. With this article we invite readers along a collaborative friendship study of our own participatory arts-based journey to understand, reclaim, and identify personal and professional benefits only realized once we acknowledged and embraced the blended reality of Mother Scholarhood. Our work is presented as a curation of individual skits, sketches, and short stories that were created during a collective 8-week time span in a shared virtual space. We open our story to interpretation and interaction through the lenses of our readers