This edited volume provides personal narratives of a diverse group of scholars in academia regarding strategies to navigate academia during times of COVID-19 and unrest. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) women in academia are grappling with emotional tolls and invisible burdens, discrimination, political turmoil, social unrest, and public health crises. Moreover, the rapid pivot response to COVID-19 has exacerbated inequities among BIPOC women in academia. This book explores their stories of ordeal, triumph, loss, and hope.
Women Educators’ Experiences During COVID-19: On the Front Lines examines the gendered experiences, challenges, and rapid changes faced by women in higher education during COVID-19. The book’s chapters cover lived experiences ranging from graduate students navigating the pandemic to those grappling with balancing motherhood and the academy. Through these diverse perspectives, this edited collection explores the impact of the diversity and nuances of the feminine identity on navigating higher education during an international health crisis. Ultimately, contributors provide recommendations for best practices and suggestions for change for administrators, faculty, and policymakers to dismantle the academy as a male-dominated institution. Scholars of communication, gender studies, and higher education will find this book of particular interest.
“This book is a vital resource for promoting transformation and radical change in academia, offering perspectives, strategies and approaches that can be used in addressing persistent gender inequities in the field. Readers from all walks of life can glean valuable lessons from this remarkable work, allowing them to be inspired and empowered” Prof Olive Shisana, CEO of Evidence Based Solutions and Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town. There are limited books on real-life experiences of women in the workplace let alone in academia for women, by women, with women. This book is the first of its kind as it contains a unique collection of 16 powerful and inspiring stories of success and struggle of women in academia across age groups, career stages, disciplines, and geographies, that will never leave you the same. It offers a platform for validating African women’s experiences and heeding their voices which are hardly given any audience in many spaces. You will experience a mixed set of emotions as you celebrate women’s resilience, contributions made, and valuable insights shared, but also realize the dehumanizing experiences that women had to go through, and the extraordinary effort it took for them to survive and thrive in non-diverse academic environments. The book offers multiple perspectives, diverse experiences, and rich lessons derived from challenges experienced, and strategies employed, to empower the next generation. Further, the book goes beyond simply highlighting women’s struggles; it also calls for a bold and radical call to change the status quo so that future generations don’t have to go through the same turmoil. The insights provided in this book have implications for attracting, advancing, and retaining African women in academia.
In March of 2020, our daily lives were upended by the COVID pandemic and subsequent school closures. With work and school shifting online, a new and ongoing set of demands has been placed on parents as school moved to online, virtual and hybrid models of learning. Families need to balance professional responsibilities with parenting and supporting their children’s education. As education professors, we find ourselves in a particular position as our expertise collides with the reality of schooling our own children in our homes during a global pandemic. This book focuses on the experiences of education faculty who navigate this relationship as pandemic professionals and pandemic parents. In this collection of personal essays, we explore parenting in the pandemic among education professors. Through our stories, we share our perspectives on this moment of upheaval, as we find ourselves confronting practical (and impractical) aspects of long held theories about what school could be, seeing up close and personally the pedagogy our children endure online, watching education policy go awry in our own living rooms (and kitchens and bathrooms), making high-stakes decisions about our children’s (and other children’s) access to opportunity, and trying to maintain our careers at the same time. In this collision of personal and professional identities, we find ourselves reflecting on fundamental questions about the purpose and design of schooling, the value of our work as education professors, and the precious relationships we hope to maintain with our children through this difficult time. Praise for Parenting in the Pandemic "Lowenhaupt and Theoharis have curated a magnificent collection of essays that captures the hopes, fears, tensions, and possibilities of parenting in a time of crisis. A gift to parents and educators everywhere as we continue to process and reflect on what the pandemic has taught us about what it means to educate others, and perhaps through a renewed imagination, our very own children." - Sonya Douglass Horsford, Teachers College, Columbia University "In this powerful collection of essays, we have a rare window into how the personal and professional worlds of academics collided during the COVID-19 pandemic. What emerges from these reflections is an intimate portrait of the longstanding tensions in our lives as public intellectuals and parents that have long burned as embers, but are now set ablaze by the public health, economic, and educational crisis we have lived through during the last year. Reading these essays will help us to see questions of education policy and practice in a new, more personal light." - Matthew Kraft, Brown University
With the increasing focus on the critical importance of mentoring in advancing Black women students from graduation to careers in academia, this book identifies and considers the peer mentoring contexts and conditions that support Black women student success in higher education. This edited collection focuses on Black women students primarily at the doctoral level and how they have retained each other through their educational journey, emphasizing how they navigated this season of educational changes given COVID and racial unrest. Chapters illuminate what minoritized women students have done to mentor each other to navigate unwelcome campus environments laden with identity politics and other structural barriers. Shining a light on systemic structures in place that contribute to Black women’s alienation in the academy, this book unpacks implications for interactions and engagement with faculty as advisors and mentors. An important resource for faculty and graduate students at colleges and universities, ultimately this work is critical to helping the academy fortify Black women’s sense of belonging and connection early in their academic career and foster their success.
This book argues that we are currently witnessing not merely a decline in the quality of social science research, but the proliferation of meaningless research, of no value to society, and modest value to its authors - apart from securing employment and promotion. The explosion of published outputs, at least in social science, creates a noisy, cluttered environment which makes meaningful research difficult, as different voices compete to capture the limelight even briefly. Older, more significant contributions are easily neglected, as the premium is to write and publish, not read and learn. The result is a widespread cynicism among academics on the value of academic research, sometimes including their own. Publishing comes to be seen as a game of hits and misses, devoid of intrinsic meaning and value, and of no wider social uses whatsoever. Academics do research in order to get published, not to say something socially meaningful. This is what we view as the rise of nonsense in academic research, which represents a serious social problem. It undermines the very point of social science. This problem is far from 'academic'. It affects many areas of social and political life entailing extensive waste of resources and inflated student fees as well as costs to tax-payers. Part two of the book offers a range of proposals aimed at restoring meaning at the heart of social research and drawing social science back address the major problems and issues that face our societies.
This engaging collection of recent essays reveals how a professorial career involves not only pursuit of a scholarly discipline but also such unwelcome features as the tribulations of graduate school, the trials of teaching, and the tensions that develop from membership in a department. The author, who enjoyed a distinguished career as a professor of philosophy and senior university administrator, draws on his extensive experience to offer candid advice about handling the frustrations of academic life. Combining philosophical principles, practical concerns, and personal observations, this book serves as a reliable guide for both new and veteran academics as well as for anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of colleges and universities.
The 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia. These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game -- the things you need to know but usually aren't told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors -- and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia. Are you studying or working in academia and in need of support? Perhaps you’re finding your work, study or personal life challenging or overwhelming; are experiencing bullying, harassment or abuse; or find your progress is being blocked by unfair, exploitative or precarious systems? Or perhaps you want to support a friend or colleague who’s struggling? Whether your problems are big or small, Being Well in Academia provides a wealth of practical and workable solutions to help you feel stronger, safer and more connected in what has become an increasingly competitive and stressful environment. This volume uses a realistic, pragmatic and – above all – understanding approach to offer support to a diverse audience. Covering a range of issues, it includes advice on: Ways to increase your support network, so you’re not alone. Reflections and actions that encourage you to evaluate your position. Guidance if you are in a stressful, precarious, dangerous or exploitative situation. Checklists and agreements to help you identify your specific needs and accommodations. Signposting to books, websites, networks and organisations that provide additional support. Ways to build your confidence and connections, particularly for Black, Indigenous or People of Colour; LGBTQ+; disabled or chronically sick; or other marginalised groups. Reflections on your rights and the responsibilities academia should be meeting. Tips for being an active bystander and helping others in need of assistance. Ideas for resisting, challenging and coping with unfair or exploitative environments. Suggestions for bringing you happiness, inspiration, motivation, courage and hope. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to address the need to stay well in academia, and will be particularly useful to those in diverse or disadvantaged positions who currently lack institutional support or feel at risk from academia.
This book adopts collaborative autoethnography as its methodology, and presents the collective witnessing of experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic within the higher education sector. Through the presentation of staff and student experiences and what was learnt from them, the authors examine the global phenomenon that is the COVID-19 pandemic through the purposeful exploration of their own experiences. This book presents an overall argument about the state of higher education in the middle of the pandemic and highlights academic issues and region-specific challenges. The reflections presented in this book offer insights for other staff and students, as well as academic policy-makers, regarding the pandemic experiences of those within academia. It also offers practical suggestions as to how we as a global community can move forward post-pandemic.
Aside from the dramatic effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the lives of people everywhere, it has also triggered and accelerated some important process changes in healthcare. Digital health has become ever more important, supporting test strategies and contact tracing, statistical analysis, prognostic modeling, and vaccination roll-out and documentation. Video calls have become more common, and it seems likely that all these changes will continue to influence healthcare in the longer-term. This book presents the proceedings of dHealth 2021 – the 15th annual conference on Health Informatics Meets Digital Health – held as a virtual conference on 11 & 12 May 2021. The dHealth conference is where research and application meet as equals, and the conference series has been contributing to scientific exchange and networking since 2007. The 2021 edition is the second that has been organized virtually. Each year, this event attracts 300+ participants from academia, industry, government and healthcare organizations, and provides a platform for researchers, practitioners, decision makers and vendors to discuss innovative health informatics and dHealth solutions with the aim of improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare. The 24 papers included here offer an insight into the research on digital health conducted during the COVID-19 crisis, and topics include the management of infectious diseases, telehealth services, standardization and interoperability in healthcare, nursing informatics, data analytics, predictive modeling and digital tools for rare-disease research. The book provides new healthcare insights from both science and practice, and will be of interest to all those working in healthcare.
