The home-based postdoctoral mother in the neoliberal university

Abstract

For centuries, women have practiced home-based work. What happens when this strategy enters the academy? What happens when a postdoctoral fellowship becomes home-based work? Using autoethnography, I examine the home-based postdoc as one option sought by gendered subjects with care obligations and limited mobility for accruing academic capital. Through telecommuting and occasional visits, aspiring academic mothers gain valuable experience at prestigious institutions without incurring the immediate social and financial costs of uprooting their families. Yet women’s home-based academic work cannot provide the long-term professional and care benefits of on-campus presence. To probe the challenges and strategies of a home-based postdoctoral mother, I study three tensions: im/mobility, spaces of re/production and care. This ploy for decoupling geographic from social mobility and reconciling family care with career progression speaks to gendered labour relations and the work-life balance myth. The home-based postdoc, with its inherent compromises, is thus a perennial site of critique of the neoliberal academic institution.

Keywords:

• Care
• home-based work
• im/mobility
• mother
• neoliberal university
• postdoc

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my network of academic colleagues and mentors, and family and friends, who support my home-based postdoc. I am especially grateful for Rachel Silvey’s insights and encouragement in writing this paper. Thank you to the three anonymous reviewers and GPC editors who wove care into their recommendations for improving this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Notes on contributors

Christine Gibb

Christine Gibb was a home-based postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She researched how gendered religious practices, institutions and norms determine access to disaster assistance in Southeast Asia.