The pandemic has brought to fore many invisible and marginal lived experiences of families, because of the inequalities and biases within our society. In this article, I reflect upon my experiences while juggling childcare, responsibilities for research and teaching online.
Early in the pandemic, discussions, and debates on productivity on various social media platforms focussed on Shakespeare and how he wrote his greatest works during the bubonic plague. This was followed by a burgeoning of published articles on COVID-19, which were mostly authored by Western, male academics. The discourse soon shifted to acknowledging the gendered nature of pandemic publishing, impact of the pandemic on women, and an emphasis on how shutting down schools and educational institutes have affected parents who are now struggling to find a balance between their professional and family responsibilities.
Indian Prime Minister’s rhetoric of atma-nirbharta (self-reliance) although focussing on small businesses and economic front stood true even for families and households. The months of lockdown jeopardised women’s safety. It added to their household responsibilities, along with the burden of academia and the digital workplace. It placed conflicting demands on domestic and professional obligations, where intensity of caregiving magnified not only for children, but also for elderly parents, relatives and family members living with comorbidities. Additional time and efforts went into following the safety norms and changing the habits to protect oneself and their family members.
In ‘How to do Nothing’ by Jenny Odell cites Jedediah Purdy and talks about how the society will have to rethink how it views caring as technology is replacing aspects of our lives. “Much socially necessary work is ignored or devalued as caregiving, a gendered afterthought to the real dynamics of the economy when in reality no shared life could do without it.” (Odell, 2019). As a woman juggling between caregiving responsibilities along with my academic and entrepreneurial pursuits, I often found it difficult to compartmentalise my roles and perform decently on any of these fronts. My child was unschooled prior to the pandemic, but I continued to meet his developmental needs by planning and developing home-based activities to suit his learning needs – painting, reading and play sessions. He could no longer go to play; I could not let him go overboard with his screen time while I continued attending several Zoom meetings. It became a daily struggle to keep the child engaged and continue to provide them a safe environment that stimulates them. As a caregiver for elderly parents, I was conscious about their news cycle consumption, and we adopted strict safety and sanitising measures to keep each surface clean and virus-free. One of the earliest steps I had to take was to consistently keep the child away from reports about Corona, and police enforcement measures during the lockdown. How do we explain mass exodus of migrants to a three-year-old? How do you explain why the masi who came home every day to help with household chores does not come any longer? What will coronavirus and lockdown even mean to a child?
The move to online teaching, avenues for new research and prohibitions on undertaking research digitally continues to build the pressure on publications and an individual’s performance. This switch to a digital pedagogical model was an added element that globally every academic institute, schools and educational facilities were making at a quick speed. Murrey et al (2020) discussed that although digitalisation opened opportunities for democratisation of knowledge through increased collaboration and availability of information and materials online (whether in the form of online lectures, papers, or other digital artefacts), there were major downsides, such as the heightened potential for surveillance and for retrenchment and exploitation of lecturing staff.
As a newly recruited teaching faculty, I was tasked with the development of a new interdisciplinary module on environment. When the semester began, I was grappled with concerns around mental health of students, their extended screen time and how it affected their health. I, like many other members held space for them during classes and outside office hours to allow them to share their experiences, fears, and struggles. Noticing the parallels between teaching and caring responsibilities in a pandemic, I came to realise that both took an emotional and practical toll on me. In my conversations with other parents over social media and WhatsApp groups, I realised that we all were facing the same anxieties, which were only fuelled by the restrictions on access to public spaces, the need to continue children’s education, balancing the demands of employment along with the responsibilities of childrearing.
Although, the experience of the lockdown is so personal, and often reflects the privileges that one enjoys, there are some universalised conclusions, which can be drawn upon in a systematic manner (Crook, 2020). Teaching, research, student outreach and recruitment, development of new course modules and grant applications must continue with higher demand, speed, and attention to detail. This is prefaced in the larger issues of neoliberal universities, commodification of knowledge, marketisation of education and application of global standards and metrics for performance, overlap with the expectations and achievements of a mother in academia. The pre-pandemic concerns that women’s unequal responsibility for reproduction and childrearing might lead to women’s subordinated position in the academia is valid during the pandemic as well. For instance, gender pay gap in Indian academia means women are less likely to hold higher positions under highest salary brackets: researchers have attributed this to women’s tendency to take career breaks to have children, the lack of family-friendly institutional support, and their childrearing responsibilities. Having discussed women’s role as a parent and a teacher, I also acknowledge that these binaries fail to capture other differential and subaltern experiences around gender, race, disability, other care responsibilities.
Adrienne Rich wrote, “It is difficult to imagine, unless one has lived it, the personal division, endless improvising, and creative and intellectual holding back that for most women accompany the attempt to combine the emotional and physical demands of parenthood and the challenges of work. To assume that one can naturally combine these has been a male privilege everywhere in the world.” (Rich, 1975, p 147). Now, it is tasked upon us how we power through this epochal period with compassion and hope but also taking along experiences of everyone within the academia.