The Liminality of Multinational Muslim MotherScholaring during COVID-19: A Feminist Collaborative Autoethnography

ABSTRACT

Current life in the US under the COVID-19 pandemic makes visible the fragility of supportive structures for academics with childcare responsibilities. Particularly academic mothers are left grappling with the impact of social and institutional shifts that took place due to the global pandemic. We, two early career multinational and Muslim MotherScholars, ask ourselves how these shifts are affecting our own entanglements of scholarship, job market navigation, motherhood, childcare responsibilities and routines, family traditions, and religious observation through feminist autoethnography. We used the concept of “liminal space” as our theoretical foundation. Data were collected through journal entries and analytic memos, and four vignettes were composed to (re)present the analysis. The vignettes display how Western dominant and nondominant spaces inform the ways in which the authors’ identities are interloped, muted, contested, and thrown into tension with changing social and institutional expectations during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research has implications for higher education administrators who wish to gain a glimpse into the lived experiences and barriers of their international, Muslim, mothering employees, and for MotherScholars who live through similar complex and shifting identities to see validation and representation.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the guest editors for creating this space to have a diverse range of MotherScholar voices heard, their experiences validated, and their work appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ While childcare is often understood as a form of domestic labor, we will distinguish the two considering the specific focus on mothering in this paper. We use domestic labor to refer to routine house tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and household maintenance, while childcare refers to tending to and caring for children.

² usrah, ‘ailah: Arabic terms for close and extended family, resp.

³ katayef: A type of dessert that Muslims, particularly Middle Easterners, make during Ramadan.

⁴ jama’ah: an Arabic word that means in groups.

⁵ iftar: an Arabic word that means breaking fast.

⁶ azzoumeh: an Arabic word that means invitation.

⁷ Literal translation: raven mother.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina A. Azim

Katharina A. Azim, PhD, is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her current research centers around women’s reproductive health, agency, and rights in the United States, and specifically on experiences of painful sexual intercourse in young women. Katharina’s most recent empirical work focuses on how women’s experiences of sexuality and health are influenced by various institutions, like the medical system, religion, education, etc. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Sexual Medicine, Culture, Health, and Sexuality, and Women and Birth. Katharina is also a founding member of the Motherscholar Collective, an interdisciplinary coalition of around 70 academic mothers who created a feminist participatory research agenda around the intersectional experiences of parenting young children during COVID-19.

Wesam M. Salem

Dr Wesam M. Salem is a Clinical Instructor of Mathematics Education and Site Coordinator at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on examining students’ mathematics identity development informed by the sociopolitical context and ethnic studies in education. She also focuses on mathematics teacher educator’s practices in methods courses that promote teaching mathematics conceptually with equity and social justice orientation. She earned her bachelor’s in physics from the University of Jordan, her master’s in education at the University of Memphis, and her doctorate in Instruction and Curriculum Leadership at the University of Memphis.