Academic Mothers Building Online Communities: It Takes a Village

ISBN-13: 9783031266645 / Angielski / Twarda / 2023

Sarah Trocchio; Lisa K. Hanasono; Jessica Jorgenson Borchert

Opis

This volume focuses on the diverse ways in which mothers working within academia seek to find others with similar experiences to build virtual communities. Although the faculty and student populations of universities have diversified, mothers in academia are disproportionately overrepresented in precarious faculty and staff positions and continue to experience myriad institutional and interpersonal barriers, such as gender wage gaps that are exacerbated by stop-the-clock tenure policies, inadequate parental leave policies, expensive or scarce local childcare options, and social biases. The book gives space to the many ways women create and challenge their own versions of motherhood through a digital “village,” examining how academic mothers use virtual communities to seek and enact different kinds of support.

Spis treści

1. It Takes a Village: Academic Mothers Building Online Communities

Part I Identity and Marginalization

2. How Finding Identity with an Online Community Led to Advocacy

3. (Un)Supported: Challenges and Opportunities Experienced by Academic Mothers of Color in Online Communities

4. Barefoot Strangers: Multinational Digital Epistemologies of Academic Moms, Mamás, Mamy, Umahat

5. Creating an Online Community of Support: Mothers of Children with Disabilities Working in the Academy

6. Who Is There When Everything Changes?: The Anchoring Effect of Online Maternal Support Groups During Periods of Liminal Professional Identity

7. How Academic Mothers Experience Face Threatening Acts and Reinforcing Facework on Instagram

8. #GradStudentMom Finds Community Online

9. Being Alone Together: The Affordances and Constraints of Social Media Groups for Single Moms

Part II Connection and Support

10. Dealing with Death in Academia, or When 11,000 Mamas* Had my Back

11. The Face(book) of Academic Motherhood: Online Communities Respond to the Traumatic and the Mundane

12. Hell Hath No Fury Like a Scorned Woman’s Friend: Reflected Anger in Academic Mother* Online Groups

13. Online Groups as Source for Communication about the Taboo: Sexual Implications for Academic Mothers*

14. Social Support Theory: Physical Isolation and Academia with Children

Part III Pandemic Parenting

15. Building Welcoming Spaces on Social Media: Motherhood in Academia During a Pandemic and Beyond

16. Drafting while Drifting: Developing a Digital Village of Support and Advocacy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

17. Building a Virtual Village: Academic Mothers’* Online Social Networking During COVID-19

18. The First Rule about Writing Group: How a Virtual Writing Group Changed My Trajectory Without Saying a Word

19. “Comedy and Tragedy,” or How We Used Our Group Chat to Fill the Pandemic Care Gap

20. Kids at the Door: An Autoethnography of Our Shared Research Identity as Academic Mothers in Virtual Collaboration

O autorze

Sarah Trocchio is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Rider University, USA. Trocchio's research focuses on the mechanisms through which structural inequity is reflected, reinforced, or mitigated in varied workplace contexts. She is a nationally board certified coach in the USA, and owns her own career coaching and strategy practice called the Square Peg Club (SPC). 

Lisa K. Hanasono is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication and an affiliated faculty of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Bowling Green State University, USA. She researches how people communicate social biases, shatter stigmas, and respond to discrimination.

Jessica Jorgenson Borchert is Associate Professor of English, Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, and Director of Professional Writing at Pittsburg State University, USA. She has previously published on breastfeeding rhetoric and postpartum dress practices in academia.

Rachael Dwyer is Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy in the School of Education and Tertiary Access, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Her scholarly work is underpinned by a social change agenda, engaging in arts-based research that allows for collaborative, applied work drawing on rich and longitudinal relationships with participants, students and the broader community.

 

Jeanette Yih Harvie is a Research Associate with the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University, USA.  She has published extensively on how public policy and political institutions impact the citizenship development and political behavior of military veterans and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups.