Keeping Everyone Buoyant: The Care Work of Women Faculty and Research Staff during COVID-19

Abstract

The authors explore how the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic amplified a broad range of care practices for women in academia. Engaging the lived experiences of faculty and research staff members, the authors investigate the entangled impact of care on work-life productivity during the first year and a half of the global pandemic. Mixed-methods data include roundtable accounts focusing on the COVID-19 experiences of woman employees at a Canadian university with supplementary analyses from a related institutional survey. The findings demonstrate a triangulated configuration of care responsibilities: care directly associated with work, care outside of work without disruption to professional excellence, and pressures of self-care. The authors conclude by describing the “cruel optimism” of care that is at once rewarding but simultaneously diminishing to personal flourishing. This article contributes to analytical efforts to critically redefine care in higher education as an ambivalent set of laborious practices steeped in inequities.