Surviving the COVID-19 Pandemic with a Wolf Pack and the Marco Polo App

This narrative nonfiction essay explores the ways in which a group of academic mothers used Marco Polo, a video instant messaging app, to remain tethered to each other and to their work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The mothers, who are a combination of millennial and Gen Xers with children aged two to twenty-three, hail from a range of academic disciplines (e.g., theatre, education, environmental science, community health, counseling, psychology, and hospitality administration). We were all well into our careers and accustomed to grappling with the myriad ways in which the things we were raised to believe—that we could do anything we put our minds to and could definitely be mothers and career women—sometimes still felt like a pipe dream. And then COVID-19 came barreling into our lives, laying waste to all the usual coping and time management strategies upon which we typically rely. Since mid-March, we have exchanged an average of between fifty and seventy-five Marco Polo messages per day and have covered a wide range of topics—from spice storage methods, to preferred Cheeto shapes, to teaching our children to do long division while attending Zoom meetings, and to watching our male colleagues soar in terms of research productivity while we struggle to find five minutes of uninterrupted time to respond to an email. The essay offers some speculative ideas as to the role Marco Polo played in a larger story about connections between adult women during challenging times

Little Free Libraries: A View from the Back Road

Commentary piece in response to Schmidt, H. and Hale, J. (2017). Little Free Libraries®: Interrogating the impact of the branded book exchange. Journal of Radical Librarianship, 3, 14–41

Activist 101 Activities for Pre-Service Teachers

This Teaching Note briefly describes three activities that can easily be integrated into any teacher education course

Creating an Organization to Support SFA’s Women Employees

The purpose of this session is two-fold. First, we wish to introduce the SFA OWLE (Organization for Women’s Leadership and Equity), the newly created professional women’s organization, to interested members of our campus community. Second, we wish to share experiences that we believe are relevant to others on our campus, in our community, and at other institutions, who might seek to create organizations through which to advocate for the unique needs of their marginalized or underrepresented group. To that end, this session will include a panel of female employees at SFA who have worked for more than a year to plan for, create, and implement a professional women’s organization for our campus. The panel will begin the session by sharing the reasons why a professional women’s organization is needed on our campus (as well as many similar institutions nationwide) and will describe the steps taken to create the organization. The committees constituted in the organization’s by-laws reflect the challenges faced by women in academia. We will share challenges we faced as we sought to create an organization that would provide support to women of differing types of employment (e.g., both staff and faculty), from different academic disciplines and areas of the university, in different stages of their personal and professional lives, and from diverse positionalities (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, parenthood status, etc.). We will also identify some of the successes our organization has achieved in its early stages

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

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

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

Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security

An Investigation of Teachers’ Perceptions of School Competitiveness and Organizational Work Environment in a Rural Area

School choice is expected to generate competition and thereby lead to organizational improvements. Using teachers’ original survey responses, this study uses the market culture within the competing values framework and finds substantial variation in how rural schoolteachers perceive competitive pressure and school climate. When we restricted our analysis to teachers from low-income schools, the relationship between competition and work environment is amplified for some organizational climate variables. Findings, which suggest that higher levels of perceived competition are associated with somewhat higher morale and stronger organizational cultures, are important for school leaders and policymakers