key: cord-265597-hiqqx1a2 authors: Abdellatif, Amal; Gatto, Mark title: It's OK not to be OK: Shared Reflections from two PhD Parents in a Time of Pandemic date: 2020-05-13 journal: Gend Work Organ DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12465 sha: doc_id: 265597 cord_uid: hiqqx1a2 Adopting an intersectional feminist lens, we explore our identities as single and co‐parents thrust into the new reality of the UK COVID‐19 lock‐down. As two PhD students, we present shared reflections on our intersectional and divergent experiences of parenting and our attempts to protect our work and families during a pandemic. We reflect on the social constructions of 'masculinities' and 'emphasised femininities' (Connell, 2005) as complicated influence on our roles as parents. Finally, we highlight the importance of time and self‐care as ways of managing our shared realities during this uncertain period. Through sharing reflections, we became closer friends in mutual appreciation and solidarity as we learned about each other's struggles and vulnerabilities. Protecting your family is one of the most important roles you can play as a parent, but what happens when you cannot shield yourself or your loved ones from the threat of trauma (Cobham & Newnham, 2018) ? These reflections provide a glimpse into the lives of two PhD parents. Amal is a second-year PhD student (international), an associate lecturer, and a single parent to a 3 year old and 13 year old. Mark is a third-year PhD student (home), a research assistant, a co-parent with a 14-month-old baby (13 months old during reflections), and his wife works in the NHS. We are both exploring gender in the workplace for our PhDs. Our shared stories of the UK COVID-19 lockdown acted as both individual catharsis and collective empowerment. Through sharing, we both learned more about our intersectional identities and our efforts to act as protective shields for our families during this traumatic time. Importantly, we also chose to write together to expose and resist patriarchal models of gender through our divergent parental roles and converging feminist principles towards gender equity. We present our reflective stories in three acts represented in a single day: morning, afternoon and evenings of April 10th, 2020 -'Good Friday' (additionally recorded as a shared time-log exercise). This method provided a reassuring structure for us to work with, while also framing our lived experiences thematically and over a longer time period. We include snapshots of our 'Good Friday' to highlight how our days progressed with various points of similarity and differences. We also include reflections on our developing response to the lockdown from across a three-week period from the start of the UK lockdown on March 23rd 2020 until April 8th. We intentionally shared our reflections with each other after each new entry to enrich our collective writing experience, a process which had the additional benefit of deepening our friendship and mutual admiration. We were inspired in our collective writing approach by 'Writing Resistance Together' (Ahonen et al., 2020) . We also drew on Grenier (2015) as a model for constructing our shared autoethnography in a quasi-conversational form that expresses insights into our shared truths. We present our captured stories as both ordered and messy including ©2020 American Geophysical Union. All rights reserved. occasional spelling and grammatical errors; a messiness that reflects our lives. By making ourselves vulnerable in this way, we hope our reflective stories can pay tribute to the canon of emancipatory feminist writing (for examples, see Cixous, Cohen, & Cohen, 1976; Haraway, 1991 ) that challenges how we write about ourselves and our experiences as feminists who aspire to transcend gender binaries. "It is not sufficient to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting on this experience, it may quickly be forgotten, or its learning potential lost." Graham Gibbs (1988) We share similar identities as PhD students and parents. Through our reflective diaries, we found our experiences converge around these two intersectional identities (Crenshaw, 2018 ). Yet, our diaries also reflect how our experiences diverge from the other identities we hold; gender, ethnicity, and co-parenting vs single parenting; all of which influenced our pandemic reality. We echo Rodriguez, Holvino, Fletcher, and Nkomo (2016) in moving beyond the favoured triumvirate of gender, race and class to building a more complex ontology of intersecting socio-cognitive categories in our experiences. As we both believe in the principles of social equity, we examined and acknowledged where our identities were privileged or discriminated against in a pandemic. We feel this represents a foundational step of our feminist reflective praxis. are different to other PhD students. We must protect our study time. Just as we must protect our time with our families. And these two worlds, though, naturally will cross over. Always means that we strain to separate and retain difference. ( Hooks (1990) We found resemblance between our diary reflections around feminism and examining our femininity and masculinity in the context of COVID-19. We reflected on Mark's experiences of 're-embodied masculinity' (Connell, 2005) to embrace his caring role against the cultural template of 'hegemonic masculinity'. At the same time, Amal reflected on her resistance through single-parenting to the cultural template of 'emphasised femininity' (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) . We present our non-conformant femininities and masculinities as a challenge to the institutionalised, 'assumed' and regulated practices around our gender (Butler, 2004) . 14:30 -after lunch, helped her this time to draw ON the paper rather than the walls! Also coloured Easter bunny and little eggs. (Amal) (the older) practicing some masculine domination over his sister. For example, asking her not to talk in a certain way as she is a 'girl'. I observed similar behaviour from my daughter towards my son. For example, seeing him wearing or playing with something that does not conform to his gender, she directly says "this is not for boys, this is for girls". Here, I realised how I come out as a feminist rather than only a mother and intervene in the conversation. I try to challenge the way I was raised (and resisted) Sartre (1956, p. 29) Our experiences of time have been stretched, squeezed and snapped at various stages of this pandemic. As our working days stretched into evenings, we tended to squeeze our time with more intensity until, with fatigue, we snapped. Some experiences converged, especially our moments of vulnerability and need to take time for self-care, while others diverged. Our ©2020 American Geophysical Union. All rights reserved. need to compartmentalise our time as parents and PhD students acts as an ever-present pressure we both battle with. work always feels like a race against time. It is a race that I will never win, (Mark - As PhD parents, we cannot escape the ticking of time and looming deadlines; we constantly feel this pressure, even at the best of times. The lockdown has meant we cannot produce the volume, nor achieve the quality of focus and output required to meet our own perceived expectations. With each passing minute, we experience prodding fingers and shouts for attention, which wrench us away from the immersion needed to produce our best work. In such a competitive discipline as academia, where success is measured on the 'publish or perish' continuum, our very survival as early career academics is at the forefront of our minds. "In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity." Albert Einstein "To be a complete individual, equal to man, woman has to have access to the male world as man does to the female one, access to the other; but the demands of the other are not symmetrical in the two cases." Beauvoir (2011, p. 818) Reviewing our reflections, we have both been comforted by our two lives lived in simultaneously divergent, yet similar moments of vulnerability with our families. As we have shared reflections during these early days and weeks, and we have grown closer as friends, despite the enforced distance we must observe. We have glimpsed behind the veil of our professional selves, allowed ourselves to share our precious private lives, and gained something far more valuable in our mutual admiration for each other as people. As Amal has embodied the total parent from teacher to chef, carer, friend and protector, while squeezing in her studies; Mark has experienced periods of re-embodied masculinity as transient sole primary carer and support to his wife. Our experiences are unequal, but we ©2020 American Geophysical Union. All rights reserved. have both gained unplanned access to the 'other' as working parents, peers and friends. It is this 'other' that builds our case to embrace our vulnerabilities as parents towards a collective strength that could endure beyond this lockdown. Is this a beginning to an end or an end to a new beginning? Will we get back to the life we knew? In these ambiguous uncertain times, there are plenty of unanswered questions. Even with this ambiguity, we think everyone by now already will have a long 'To Do After the Lockdown List'. This could be something as simple as a friend's hug, a cautious handshake, a staff kitchen gossip, a chilled drink at the pub, or that long overdue haircut! Since the lockdown started, in each household, we became a huge conglomerate of organisations. We are the university, the school, the nursery, the gym, the restaurant, the library, and the hairdresser. Will we see this as an ugly experience that brought all social inequalities and injustice to the surface? Or will we see it as a great opportunity for family, self-discovery, open vulnerability, resilience, love, compassion and solidarity? Will we value one another differently, or will it be a matter of time before we get back to the 'old' reality of busy bees buzzing around the hive? All we do know is that this shared experience has meant more to us than we anticipated. We helped each other see the light at the end of our separate tunnels and, out of our solidarity as feminists, our friendship has blossomed. Writing resistance together. Gender, Work & Organization The Second Sex Undoing Gender. London: Routledge Ltd Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis. Signs The Laugh of the Medusa Trauma and Parenting: Considering Humanitarian Crisis Contexts Masculinities. Berkley and Los Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics Feminist legal theory Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods Autoethnography as a legitimate approach to HRD research: A methodological conversation at 30,000 feet A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics The theory and praxis of intersectionality in work and organisations: Where do we go from here? Gender Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology We both wish to formally thank our supervisor, Professor Jamie Callahan, whose continuous mentorship and empathy has ensured we felt fully supported, especially during these traumatic times. We also want to thank Jamie for encouraging us to write collectively and learn from each other. We both feel very fortunate to work with such an inspiring leader. ©2020 American Geophysical Union. All rights reserved.