2. Work/Home

Work/Home

CONTEXT

The archives exhibited in this gallery reflect on relationships between ‘work’ and ‘home’, which have been intensified, complicated and changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. They depict a breadth of experiences of work, home and working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic; ‘a mosaic of interpretive snapshots and vignettes of a particular social space and social practices in the making’ (Latham 2003: 2005). They point to discourses and relationships of power which shape participants’ experiences of these spaces and the ways in which they were reinforced or disrupted by the pandemic.

The sudden shift to working from home in March 2020 wrought profound changes in academics’ working practices. Initially assumed to be a short-term measure, working from home, teaching and meeting online, became a new norm, albeit in hybrid forms across institutions and roles as the pandemic evolved. This research has found that for female academics, the shift of paid labour into the domestic/household space blurred boundaries between work and home, impacted on an already unevenly distributed burden of care within the household and has implications for longer-term career progression.

An emerging literature (Boncori 2020; Fazackerly 2020; Kitchener 2020 inter alia) documents the disadvantages female academics have faced in sustaining academic research and writing for publication. Yet REF2021 continued with only minor modifications (REF2021, 2020) and the REF2027/28 cycle has already begun. Given that REF metrics of publication and impact drive career progression and success, there are longer-term implications for female academics’ careers. Against a backdrop of deeply uncertain times for the sector and the global economy, Kitchener (2020) argues: ‘the coronavirus is skewing a playing field that wasn’t ever level in the first place’. The damage done to female academic’s research productivity in 2020 and 2021 will start to show in the next few years.

REFERENCES
Boncori, I. (2020) The Never-ending Shift: A feminist reflection on living and organizing academic lives during the coronavirus pandemic. Feminist Frontiers. Gender, Work and Organisation.
Fazackerly, A. (2020). ‘Women’s research plummets during lockdown but articles from men increase’, The Guardian 12 May, [online]. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/may/12/womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase [Accessed 5 December 2020].
Kitchener, C. (2020). ‘Women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus. ‘Never seen anything like it,’ says one editor’, The Lily 24 April, [online]. Available from https://www.thelily.com/women-academics-seem-to-be-submitting-fewer-papers-during-coronavirus-never-seen-anything-like-it-says-one-editor/ [Accessed 22 February 2022].
Latham, A. (2017) Research, performance, and doing human geography: some reflections on the diary-photograph, diary-interview method. Environment and Planning A 35: 1993-2017.
REF2021 (2020). Guidance on revisions to REF2021. [online]. Available from https://www.ref.ac.uk/publications/guidance-on-revisions-to-ref-2021/ [Accessed 22 February 2022].

2

Context

Participants’ accounts
The pivot: working from home
The pivot: online
Experiences of homeschooling
The burden of care
Hidden labour
The benefits of tech
Productivity and career progression