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Basque, Joëlle et Sénac, Coline (avr. 2025). Balancing between Books and Milk Bottles : Academic Mothers’ Colliding identities, présentée à Qualitative Research in Management and in Organization Conference, Albuquerque.
Fichier(s) associé(s) à ce document :|
PDF
- QRM.pdf
Contenu du fichier : Diaporama Accès restreint |
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| Catégorie de document : | Communications à des congrès/colloques et conférences (non publiées) |
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| Évaluation par un comité de lecture : | Oui |
| Étape de publication : | Non publié |
| Résumé : | This is the beginning Of the rest of my life Writing or washing Reading or tidying Emailing or baking Torn apart Between guilt and career Between motherhood and everyday life Dedication or sacrifice Hard work or laziness Cooking or ordering I must teach I must create Through the pores of my brain I exist I breathe For her, my child And for me This poem, written by one of the co-authors (Joëlle), illustrates the inner struggles of a young mother returning to work as a university professor after a year's maternity leave. Writing was an inevitable way of making sense of the identity shift that was taking place within her. How to integrate this new role – being a mother – into her identity? How to reconcile this new role with the demanding role of a university professor? She was joined by Coline, the other co-author, who realized she was going through this identity struggle as well. What began as two personal journeys gradually evolved into a research enquiry as we discovered that we were not alone in the endeavor of reconciling these two demanding roles and, more profoundly, these (in)compatible identities. Navigating the complex terrain of being an academic mother The complicated journey of academic mothers – or those on the cusp of motherhood – unfolds as a compelling, and often misunderstood, narrative within academia. The blog “Mama is an Academic” curated by Leventon et al. (2019), sheds light on the hurdles these women face as they strive to balance their career ambitions with the responsibilities of parenthood. This online platform serves as a tribute to the diverse array of experiences that encapsulate the triumphs, challenges, and struggles of academic motherhood. The evolution of parental identity among academics, as articulated by Van Engen et al. (2021), represents a particularly multifaceted journey for women . Balancing between this dual existence is not simply a matter of juggling responsibilities but involves a profound negotiation of self-identity and professional identity. Despite acknowledging the central role of fathers in caregiving (Allen et al., 2012), our focus remains on mothers, highlighting the unequal burden of caregiving responsibilities that disproportionately affects women, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds in academia (LGBTQ+, BIPOC, etc.). Academic mothers struggle with disparities in workload distribution compared to men. Babcock et al. (2022) suggest that women are significantly overburdened with non-promotable work: they are 44% more likely to be assigned this work than men, and 50% more likely to accept it. This can lead to delayed progress in securing tenured positions, despite having commendable publication rates and producing highly quality work (Le Feuvre et al., 2019). The neoliberal academic landscape further exacerbates these challenges, demanding relentless productivity while often lacking the necessary support structures—such as adequate childcare services and job security—to achieve work-life equilibrium, especially amid societal expectations and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (Blithe, 2022; Davies & Petersen, 2005; Yerkes et al., 2022). As a result, women are often torn between pursuing an academic career and starting a family, often choosing to delay motherhood in order to stabilize their careers, with some ultimately remaining childless (Hewlett, 2002; Lorenti et al., 2024; Mendez & Watson, 2024). This dilemma underscores the sacrifices women may have to make when choosing between academic advancement and motherhood. This highlights the need for supportive narratives that promote the viability of academic motherhood. Focus on the identity of the academic mother Both academia and motherhood are greedy institutions that require unwavering commitment, ceaseless effort, and deep dedication. Ward and Wolf-Wendel (2012) describe how academic mothers often practice “satisficing”—a series of compromises essential to synchronizing their roles as academics and mothers, managing the intricate balance between books and milk bottles, and between university and home. Both identities can be thought of as “performance,” which means performing consistently under the scrutiny by others. For example, mothers feel the pressure to be “flawless,” or to maintain a certain way of presenting themselves in public and private spaces. As they navigate between these pressures, they must also perform figures of authority and power as academics, although having feelings of inadequacy, such as the pervasive imposter syndrome (Bostock, 2014). This highlights the intersection of personal and professional identities that is often overlooked in traditional research – as Miller (2007) suggests by the title of her article: “Is this what motherhood all about?” Research tends to focus more on structural and practical challenges rather than the development of identity itself. However, academic mothering often means experiencing significant changes in one’s sense of self, which becomes a crucial shift in one’s form of self-understanding. In the intricate dance of academic life and motherhood, they have to reset their life priorities in order to maintain their mental health (Delgado-Herrera et al., 2024). This demonstrates the importance of understanding the “self-as-mother” as an evolving one, which often involves going through crisis and tensions in daily life as academia demands a culture of performance. Therefore, this research, through an autoethnographic approach, examines how academic moms shape, constitute, and transform their identities. What does it mean to be a mother and an academic? By focusing on the constitutive process of their complex identity journey, this research seeks to uncover the richness and complexity of academic motherhood, and provide insights into how these academic women “make sense of motherhood,” as Miller (2005) calls it, and by doing so constitute academia as a better context for being a mother as well as a professor. A CCO account for collective autoethnography Inspired by our previous personal writings and joint discussions, we are conducting a collaborative autoethnography that explores how we, as academic mothers, make sense ofour lives through the lenses of their different identities, and how these identities collide in everyday situations. This autoethnographic approach is coupled with the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) to better understand how people constitute and redefine their identities in the interactions, with themselves or with others, depending on what they experience as struggles or challenges (Chaput & Basque, 2022), what Delamont (2009) calls their “small crises.” Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that uses data, in the form of a personal narrative that can take many shapes, about self and context. However, if this self-centered approach has been criticized, it is also acknowledged that personal experience can provide a new and unique vantage point from which to contribute to science. But if autoethnography is considered in its interpretive dimensions—as acts of meaning for the self (Bochner, 2012; Denzin, 2014)—it has “tremendous potential for building knowledge.” Coupled with a CCO approach, it provides the theoretical distance that can lead to renewed understanding of the constitutive dimension of identity struggles. From a research standpoint, collaborative (auto)ethnography involves an iterative and reflective process in which participants gain an understanding of the connection between self and other through discussions (Allen et al., 2012). This methodology facilitates an in-depth exploration of participants’ personal and professional experiences, thereby fostering a more nuanced understanding of identity-related challenges. Particularly, collective biography can “make visible, palpable and hearable the constitutive effect of dominant discourses…and open both ourselves and discourse to the possibility of change” (Davies & Gannon, 2006, 5). Furthermore, the CCO approach emphasizes how communication activities materialize identities and shape identification processes, which in turn recursively affects the organization’s constitution as a coherent and structured “actor” of coordinated action (Chaput & Basque, 2022). In particular, this approach facilitates a recursive loop of sharing experience through (auto)ethnography. As Bencherki & Matte (2019) highlight, the aim is to focus on and learn from researchers' communicative practices as they are recursively influenced by the situations they both create and bring to life through their research narratives. |
| Adresse de la version officielle : | https://www.qrmconf.org/ |
| Déposant: | Sénac, Coline |
| Responsable : | Coline Sénac |
| Dépôt : | 28 mai 2025 17:59 |
| Dernière modification : | 28 mai 2025 17:59 |
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