The mothering/scholaring self: entangled digital representations in pandemic times

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic brought new tensions in determining how to enact representations of the professional and personal selves alongside digital technologies. In this paper, we explore those tensions as entangled enactments of agencies and identities related to simultaneous mothering and scholaring. Drawing on Barad’s agential realist framework, our work acknowledges the inseparability of being and doing in its account for how our teaching, researching, feminist, maternal selves were constantly entangled with the thinking processes that occurred at the intersections of method-theory-data. This project does not adhere to conventional methodology or presentation expectations. We do not present this paper in the typified chronology comprising a clearly defined literature review, methods, and results sections. Instead, we invite readers into our project with a story. Then, we outline how our storytelling method and theoretical knowings emerged as data during our being and becoming in an in/visible pandemic-centered context.

KEYWORDS:

• Agential realism
• diffraction
• motherhood in the academy
• professional lives of working women
• digital representation

Disclosure statement

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