Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19

Displacements and Disruptions

Melanie Heath, Akosua Darkwah, Josephine Beoku-Betts, Bandana Purkayastha, Melanie Heath, Akosua Darkwah, Josephine Beoku-Betts, Bandana Purkayastha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032122656
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000530872
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

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.

Part I Disruptions

Introduction to Part 1 Disruptions: seismic work and life shifts

Akosua K. Darkwah

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223832-3

As we mentioned in the introduction, feminist and anti-racism scholars have shown how the worlds of paid work and reproductive work or care work have overlapped in our lives. Within these worlds of work, broadly paid work sites are typically separated from homes where care work is done mostly by women. Those who can afford it, pay lower income individuals to take on some of their reproductive tasks. Such was the way the world was ordered for most adults around the world until the pandemic of 2020. While most chapters describe these overlapping worlds, in this section we feature seven authors who describe the ways in which the pandemic disrupted the world of productive and reproductive work as they knew it.

Chaudhuri, Dungdung, Rajak and Patgiri writing from India highlight how the pandemic worsened an already deteriorating set of conditions in the place of work. Top-ranked public universities—bastions of academic freedom and with robust government subsidies that offer space for Indians from all walks of life to live and thrive—have recently been buffeted by changing academic and state politics. The authors describe the impact of eroding walls between academia and the world outside; the pandemic severely disrupted faculty and administrators’ ability to support their students. Using the intersections of class/caste/gender, they highlight how students’ enforced retreat to homes has unequally affected their ability to thrive.

Hernández-Medina and Afaneh, a professor and a student, respectively, in a private college in the US, highlight the important services that are connected to a university. Like Chaudhuri et al. they show that the university serves as a space for learning but also a space of serenity away from the financial and care burdens of low-income students. As bell hooks (1994) so eloquently reminds us, teaching requires paying attention to the souls of students. Hernández-Medina and Afaneh portray the ways in which the pandemic disrupted the lives of the mostly minority, low-income, first generation students at their liberal arts college. These students were faced not just with the challenge of finishing classes online but also housing difficulties and in some cases care responsibilities which undermined their ability to thrive in a learning environment. Their piece also highlights faculty members’ inability, despite their wishes, to cater fully to the needs of the diverse students.

While Hernández-Medina and Afaneh highlight the disruptions to the lives of students, Yoo focuses on the impact of the pandemic on faculty in a university environment. Focusing on Australia, Yoo highlights the seismic shifts in the ways in which universities operate because of the pandemic. Faculty members suddenly found themselves facing course cancellations, cut research positions, and reductions in incomes, producing great uncertainty. Lives were literally upturned which produced extreme distress.

All faculty members did not face job insecurities, but other aspects of academic life were disrupted. This was as true for Adiku writing from Ghana as it was for Qi, Terry and Lynn writing from the US. Adiku, a newly minted Ph.D., writes about her experiences of teaching undergraduates in a large public university, and the ways in which her transition to life as an academic was disrupted with the sudden emergence of the pandemic which unsettled teaching methods at the university. The transition to online teaching was made even more difficult by the technological challenges that some of her students faced. This piece reinforces the importance of an intersectional perspective in understanding the differential costs of the pandemic as well as the differences in the ability of faculty to successfully navigate the disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Qi et al. describe disruptions to both teaching and research activities in a criminal justice department in the US. The authors focus on the different actors whose lives are upturned by the disruptions in the delivery of a criminal justice course that combines coursework with research on incarcerated mothers. The chapter demonstrates the impact of the disruptions of the programs, not just for the researchers and students who had put in a lot of time and effort into its creation, but also the incarcerated research participants for whom the project would have been of immense benefit. The distress of the disruption was felt within and beyond academia.

Desai, Roy, Asaavari, Hernández-Ríos, and Khan focus both on the disruptions of life for faculty and graduate students who struggled with their situated precarities. They offer collaboration and collective care as antidotes to commodified self-care and a “slow” digital commons as an alternative to a corporate driven hyper-digitalized world that intensified during the pandemic. The impossibility of visiting families in other countries, concern for loved ones, anxiety about health and employment, missed opportunities in research and funding, and fear about raging political tensions in the US created “situational precarity.”

Tastsoglou and Nourpanah point to the ways in which work was disrupted, but differently for tenured faculty compared to non-tenured academics. Both faced the challenges of trying to combine care work with paid work in the same spatial setting. They discuss both the negative impacts of the disruption and the new opportunities they were able to develop, including as public spokespeople on women’s life situations.

Chapter 1 The pandemic and our entangled lives Experiencing the many relations of ruling

Maitrayee Chaudhuri, Deepali Aparajita Dungdung, Dinesh Rajak, and Rituparna Patgiri

DOI: 10.4324/9781003223832-4

Introduction

It is widely recognized that COVID-19 exacerbated existing inequalities (Deaton 2021; Harvey 2020; Purkayastha 2020). What has also become increasingly apparent is that many governments have used COVID-19 as a cover to further neoliberal policies and restrict the rights of people. India saw both. In Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a public university, wherein the four protagonists whose stories we seek to tell here are located, saw the retreat of a welfare state as it cut down public funding; and an advance of its authoritarian presence in everyday life.¹

The autoethnographies in this chapter are bound by this larger story wherein a university transformed itself as a direct arm of state power. The “new normal” that the pandemic brought in impacted not the “old normal” of JNU. Before COVID, the JNU administration had already dismantled the relaxed, everyday world of the university. We had already entered a new normal—midnight circulars, fines, protests, lockdowns, police vans, arrests, and that constant anxiety, over four years ago. The old normal of classes and seminars, lighthearted banter, and passionate after-dinner debates that once defined the university were distant memories.

We are three young research scholars, Deepali (De), Dinesh (D), Rituparna (R), and the fourth a tenured professor (Maitrayee M), just a few months short of retirement. Age, however, is not the only difference that sets us apart. We come from different regions of India, speak different languages, and do not share one common religious identity. Nor do we have a shared caste² or ethnic identity. This is quintessential India, a land once officially feted as one of “unity and diversity” whose “secular” and “plural” character was part of its constitutional commitment after it became independent in 1947. This was after almost 200 years of British colonial rule and its long history of English education that privileged some (like M, R, and De) and excluded others like D.

It is perhaps in this context that the significance of JNU needs to be gauged. It is a public university where students and teachers from starkly unequal backgrounds become fellow travelers. Everyday life in the shared public spaces of seminar rooms and dining halls, classrooms, and dhabas (street-side eateries) led to new bonding, fraternal feelings, and imaginings of a civic community. JNU offered affordable but high-quality education which opened possibilities of social mobility in a deeply unequal society.

JNU, named after India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru,³ was envisaged to be a university that would promote interdisciplinary scholarship for equitable development. It aimed to further foster ideas of humanism, secularism, social justice, international understanding, and peace (Chaudhuri 2011). Each of these ideas was cherished by the early founders of the postcolonial Indian state and enshrined in its Constitution.

Each of these ideas has been challenged since 2014 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu right-wing party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, came to power. Both brutal state power and media propaganda have been on display to recast a new majoritarian Hindu India. All dissent to this project has been labelled “anti-national” and JNU has seen a fierce attack for purportedly being a den of anti-nationals.⁴ Significantly the attack was not launched on “intellectual” grounds. The intent was instead to erase such grounds and render them as illegitimate. It was not the grounds of argument but the people who espoused them were attacked. Ridicule, derision, and online trolling of dissenting voices have been integral elements of this regime.

The pandemic and the lockdown facilitated an authoritarian state to dispense with questioning and complete the ideological task of recasting India. Repression was a necessary tool for this project. A proposal to have a battle tank in the campus was mooted to rein in JNU’s belligerent teachers and students and make them learn the virtues of “nationalism.”⁵

The reader should excuse us for this somewhat lengthy introduction. For while postcolonialism is respectable in global academia today, the subalternity of non-western experiences remain largely invisible. The details of our histories are not extraneous to our autoethnographies. They play out in our everyday lives as we battle through the pandemic in relative privilege and exclusion. Our autoethnographies therefore would make no sense without their contexts. We use extensive endnotes to fill the larger story of state and society and the dynamics of relations of ruling against which the minutiae of our everyday life played out.

Selves, societies, and intersecting histories

M. Our selves are bound not just by ties of family and kinship but are located differentially within an unequal society where caste, class, tribe, and gender intersect in complex ways. The story of our selves tells the stories of our societies. For “experiences are embedded in relations of ruling” (Smith 1987: 7). Feminist politics in our parts therefore have been entangled with a politics of economic redistribution and social justice (Chaudhuri 2004).

Thus, it is not happenstance that while three of us women belong broadly to India’s variegated middle class, Dinesh (D) a young man from a backward caste and a remote village from Madhya Pradesh, comes from a family of unskilled workers. Middle-class women are more likely to enter universities and enroll in the social sciences, itself a gendered entity in our parts (Chaudhuri 2002). Their brothers would be more likely students of engineering and management—who may end up in Silicon Valley—but that is another story. They may also be better versed in the English language like De, R, and M. Unlike them, D studied in Hindi until his postgraduation, and JNU was his first exposure to an English-medium learning. It would be many times more difficult for his sister to surmount the structural barriers to enter higher education and achieve social mobility. And she would not be familiar with the history of relations of ruling that governed bourgeois domesticity in India, shades of which structure middle-class homes such as those of De, R, and M.

The variegated nature of India’s middle class, its gendered nature, and its uneven growth across regions and communities bear upon our everyday experiences, and in all instances highlight the importance of accessible education for social mobility. De and R’s stories are exemplars.

De. I hail from Jharkhand, a descendant of two tribes, Kharia and Uraon. The middle-classness of my family has been made possible primarily because of access to public education and the public sector—key pillars of the Nehruvian model of development. My father went to a Hindi medium public school, a local college, and then to JNU for his Master’s, immediately after which he got a government job unlike other members of his extended family.

My mother came from a very “pious” Christian family and studied in one of the many missionary-run schools in the region on stipend. A significant section of the tribal people in India who took up Christianity have achieved more social mobility as compared to the rest of the tribal population—a major rallying point by the Hindu right in electoral politics of the region. For my mother, taking up a job was a necessity as she grew up in a family of ten children with financial difficulties. Immediately after finishing her bachelor’s, she wrote exams for the different public (state) sector banking jobs and took up ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Displacements, disruptions, and distress: an introduction to global feminist autoethnographies during COVID-19
• Part I Disruptions
• Part II Distress
• Part III Displacements: displacements: transnational realities and splintered lives
• Conclusion: Reflections on the pandemic from a Southern feminist scholar
• Postscript: The pandemic world in 2021
• Index