“Academic-Mothers” in Higher Education with Adult Children: Navigating Social Isolation, Shifting Households, and Professional Challenges During the Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the daily loss of lives, changing people’s mobility and relatedness, as well as bringing about disruption and transformation of health, education, economic, and cultural systems globally. The pandemic mitigation strategies, which encompassed domestic isolation, intensified household interactions and activities. Recent global studies indicate that the pandemic exposed long-standing inequities and vulnerabilities of systematically marginalized groups. It has also been argued that in academia the professional disenfranchisement and rights conflict between genders encompass differences in workload and professional support. In the South African higher education context, the pandemic created uncertainties for academic mothers who not only navigated these roles but who had diverse lived experiences of fluctuating COVID-19 infection rates and lockdown restrictions, changing household spatial arrangements, financial constraints, mental health challenges and the impact of civil unrest at the time. The disparate toll of the pandemic on academics, specifically those parenting children, performing gender-based household roles while simultaneously engaging in multiple academic duties, requires more attention in the South African context. This research article presents two autoethnographic accounts of the professional and social challenges experienced during various phases of the lockdown.