Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.

Using a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.

The paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.

The paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

This article is an autoethnography that describes an emotional journey of writing and; presenting a conference paper. While it is a personal story being told, it is a story that speaks to many other minorities in academia who continuously need to legitimize their voices in the midst of the dominant colonialist perspective. The intention of writing this autoethnography is to speak to the feelings of otherness experienced, to disrupt the traditional academic voice (Pathak, 2010), and to allow for the expression of a reality that is often hidden to those with a colonialist frame (Mohanty, 2003).

This article uses autoethnography as a methodology to reveal a personal story. Since autoethnographies help us make sense of our fragmented lives, the journey is told in chronological segments, detailing the emotions leading up to the conference presentation and its aftermath.

The findings of the article expose some of the colonialist frameworks that are still embedded in academia. They also lie in the revelation of the “spectacle of otherness” endured in the process. Drawing the reader into the author's mind and heart with the intention of understanding the other is an important part of this paper.

The first contribution of this paper lies in its decolonizing project, where Western knowledge systems and their epistemologies are the object of inquiry. The second contribution of the paper lies in its attempt to write intersectional research that does not impose predetermined categories of analysis but writes beyond specific classifications of identity. Finally, it also lies in celebrating the subjective self as a place that is worth exploring.

This article tackles the intersection of mothering and labor through the author's own experience as a feminist mother/manager from Istanbul, Turkey. It aims to revisit the first years of motherhood, exploring the struggle to invent a peculiar maternal subjectivity in opposition and negotiation with the patriarchal institution of motherhood, the new definition of maternal labor in a highly digital, neoliberal context and the issue of marital fairness in a dual-income heterosexual marriage.

The article presents an autoethnographic, retrospective and introspective inquiry into the first seven years of the author's mothering experience in order to offer an in-depth exploration of the various aspects of contemporary maternal labor.

The article shows how maternal labor has shifted in nature and expanded in scope in a contemporary non-Western context. It investigates the dissolution of the spatial, temporal and sensorial boundaries between the managerial labor dedicated to the workplace, and to the family. Highlighting the similarities of the two forms of labor, the article manifests the materiality, tangibility and visibility of maternal labor.

Further intersectional studies shall be beneficial to redefine maternal labor in different contexts.

Departing and diverting from the terms “invisible labor” and “mental load”, the article suggests a shift in terminology to stress the multifaceted medley of managerial tasks mothers undertake today.

The article provides an original take on maternal labor through the first-hand experience of a middle-class, professional mother from Istanbul, Turkey.