How the COVID-19 pandemic revealed gendered inequities in academic labor—and how to overcome them

Although the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 proved universally challenging, women, especially, found themselves caught between professional and familial responsibilities as work and homelife boundaries converged and collapsed. These gendered workplace struggles were not unique to the pandemic, but rather were exacerbated and exposed by the public health response. In Blurred Boundaries: Feminist Essays on Twenty-First-Century Academic Labor, scholars, teachers, and administrators pair eyewitness narratives with sustained interrogation of interminable labor inequities to demonstrate the ongoing dilemmas posed by gendered social and professional expectations.

Grounded in rhetoric and composition scholarship and feminist methodologies, contributors highlight systemic labor issues and suggest solutions to these embedded, ongoing problems. They pose critical questions regarding institutions' responsibilities for engaging intentional decision-making practices both to disrupt recurrent work imbalances and to support sustainable, ethically managed academic labor practices.

Jessica Edens McCrary is associate director of the National Scholarships & Fellowships Program at Emory University.

Lynée Lewis Gaillet is Distinguished University Professor of English at Georgia State University.

"This collection demonstrates that the pandemic challenged the assumed divide between academic and personal identities and calls for equitable labor practices that acknowledge the interconnections among personal and professional responsibilities."—Lois Agnew, Syracuse University, author of Fitter, Happier

"Blurred Boundaries hovers at the nexus of teaching, administration, feminism, and time (with its possibilities and constraints). In each of these accounts, motherhood and academic expectations constitute the flip sides of a single record of time. The implications of this brilliant collection of insightful essays should reverberate down the halls of academia for years to come."—Cheryl Glenn, Penn State University, Emerita, author of Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope

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Blurred Boundaries

Feminist Essays on Twenty-First-Century Academic Labor

Books, News & Resources!

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