Childcare and academia: an intervention

Abstract

In this Viewpoint, we engage with the everyday politics of academia - specifically, how caring for young children continues to affect academic work and career trajectories in ways that could be better mitigated. This viewpoint piece collates the personal accounts of six development scholars who discuss their experiences of negotiating both academia and childcare, covering fieldwork, funding, career trajectories, sharing parental responsibilities and challenges for family life. Though charting different experiences, all these contributions argue for better recognition of both the gains and persistent inequalities in how care responsibilities impact academic work and careers, and the need to better mitigate these with concrete changes to policy and practice.

Navigating the challenges of fieldwork and childcare: Revisiting ‘muddy glee’

“…A central issue is access to the field, as many families simply cannot afford to carry the extra costs of taking their children on fieldwork and/or covering the expenses of their partner being away from work. This issue underpins important questions about who subsequently creates knowledge and who is excluded (Jenkins, 2020) and has led us to argue that inadequate policies are contributing to the continuing gendered inequalities of academic geography (Hope et al, 2020). In this campaign, it has often seemed that care responsibilities primarily hinder women's access to the field and our campaign has been dominated by women.…”

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This commentary emerges from our collective interest in, and reflections on, the multiple ways in which parents working within Development Geography in UK academia negotiate the complexities of combining periods of overseas fieldwork with family life (see also Hope et al, 2020;Jenkins, 2020; DevGRG undated). Here, we bring our varied experiences of navigating these challenges (emotional, bureaucratic, and practical) into conversation with Bracken and Mawdsley's (2004) 'Muddy glee,' highlighting the ways in which a recognition of academics', especially female academics', childcare responsibilities has been largely absent from discussions around conducting fieldwork, specifically development fieldwork in the global South.

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On an ethic of not going there

“…Critiques of the “masculinist epistemologies” of fieldwork are likely familiar to most geographers, but additional critiques of the image of “who” does fieldwork – and who is excluded from this image – have been gaining wider acknowledgement in recent years. Critiques and reflections on fieldwork include those from geographers with caring responsibilities, as well as those bringing family members into the field with them (De Silva & Gandhi, 2019; Hope et al, 2020). Recent fieldwork safety advocacy work emphasises the need to acknowledge and address power dynamics, discrimination and violence surrounding race and ethnicity (particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour [BIPOC] geographers), and surrounding gender, gender‐based violence and sexual orientation (particularly for LGBTQIA+ geographers), including in university‐run field courses (Giles & Jackson, 2021; Posselt & Nuñez, 2022).…”

Care and the academy: Navigating fieldwork, funding and care responsibilities

“…We situate our commentary in relation to acknowledged trends in academia, including increasing precarity and casualisation of the academic workforce (Caretta et al, 2018; Thwaites & Pressland, 2017), persistent gender inequalities (Allen & Savigny, 2016), and a growing recognition of the ways in which care responsibilities affect academic life (Hope et al, 2020; Jenkins, 2020). Figure 1, though dated, illustrates trends in gender disparity and seniority for Geography (Maddrell et al, 2016).…”