The healing trifecta: a collaborative autoethnography on intersectionality, motherhood, and pedagogy during a global pandemic

Abstract

Using collaborative autoethnographic techniques, the authors explored the intersectionality of motherhood and academic career life during 2020, which was logistically and emotionally complex and deeply racialized. To engage in active reflexivity, the authors told their stories with the backdrop of their intersectional identities. Beginning with weekly solo journal entries, they sought to co-construct their experiences as wider commentary on several systemic challenges moms working as professors faced during a global health crisis and a racially inequitable country. Analyzed through a critical feminist theoretical lens, the data revealed stories and analyses of systemic injustices and pandemic pedagogy, unpacked using a combination of personal narratives, journal entries, and scholarly contexts, as each topic was experienced both similarly and differently by the authors. The authors found collaborative autoethnography a cathartic and therapeutic practice. One key takeaway was to elevate a humanizing pedagogy in each of their respective classrooms and spheres of influence.

Keywords:

• Autoethnography
• humanizing pedagogy
• COVID-19
• racial justice
• intersectionality
• critical feminist theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Dunbar

Dr. Rachel Dunbar is an Associate Professor of Special Education at the University of West Alabama, and is a mom, daughter, sister, and friend who loves to travel. Her goal is to share the world with others one passport at a time.

Kimberley Greeson

Dr. Kimberley Greeson is a Core Faculty Member of the Sustainability Education PhD program at Prescott College. She is a mom, partner, daughter, sister, friend, and decolonial scholar in awe of our multispecies entanglements and kinships.

Emily Alicia Affolter

Dr. Emily Alicia Affolter is the Director of and Faculty for the Sustainability Education PhD Program at Prescott College. She is a mom, partner, daughter, sibling, and enthusiastic friend of many, striving for wholeness, joy, and authenticity personally and professionally.