Abstract:This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open… Show more
“…One of the authors reflected on her latest participation in GWO writing workshop experiences in Helsinki when they discussed and dug deeper into the notion of silence related to multiple identities and pressures as foreign female academics in a male‐dominated culture. While silence is regarded as the expression of knowing and the inaudible manifestation of frailty of words, the power of silence in language arises from dispelling one's inside darkness, anxiety and void (Ahonen et al, 2020). I ask myself, ‘what are my identity/ies?…”
Section: Silence Of Living Alone In a City Gone Quiet And Silencingmentioning
This article is a personal reflection of how the current COVID‐19 pandemic affects our working lives and wellbeing, as single female academics who live alone in the UK. We offer a dialogue of our daily lives of being confined at home with lockdown measures extended. In particular, we focus on the experience of, and coping with, isolation and loneliness. Is isolation making us more socially connected? Through ‘virtual’ working and changing learning environments for us as teachers and learners, we explore changes in our working life and subsequent changes in the domestic environment. By capturing our lived experiences, we create an intellectual and safe space to voice our emotional struggles — as ‘invisible’ isolated individuals containing and consuming loneliness on our own. We foster alternative conversations as to how we might engender new perspectives from single female academics to combat social isolation in the workplace.
“…One of the authors reflected on her latest participation in GWO writing workshop experiences in Helsinki when they discussed and dug deeper into the notion of silence related to multiple identities and pressures as foreign female academics in a male‐dominated culture. While silence is regarded as the expression of knowing and the inaudible manifestation of frailty of words, the power of silence in language arises from dispelling one's inside darkness, anxiety and void (Ahonen et al, 2020). I ask myself, ‘what are my identity/ies?…”
Section: Silence Of Living Alone In a City Gone Quiet And Silencingmentioning
This article is a personal reflection of how the current COVID‐19 pandemic affects our working lives and wellbeing, as single female academics who live alone in the UK. We offer a dialogue of our daily lives of being confined at home with lockdown measures extended. In particular, we focus on the experience of, and coping with, isolation and loneliness. Is isolation making us more socially connected? Through ‘virtual’ working and changing learning environments for us as teachers and learners, we explore changes in our working life and subsequent changes in the domestic environment. By capturing our lived experiences, we create an intellectual and safe space to voice our emotional struggles — as ‘invisible’ isolated individuals containing and consuming loneliness on our own. We foster alternative conversations as to how we might engender new perspectives from single female academics to combat social isolation in the workplace.
“…We explore the possibilities and impossibilities of writing the naked self (Gannon, 2006) and the naked other in an embodied dialogical italicized writing style (Boncori and Smith, 2018;Helin, 2019a), whose lines set the stage for our written dance and our embodied theorization. In so doing, we contribute to the increasing acknowledgment of how "theorizing is endemically informed by corporeality" (Grosz, 1994;Segarra and Prasad, 2018: 2) problematizing anatomical, phallocentric organizational research approaches that "dress" bodies with overly abstract discourse (Ahonen et al, 2020;Fotaki, 2013;Phillips et al, 2014;Pullen et al, 2020;Thanem and Knights, 2019). Our understanding of nakedness responds to calls to reclaim eros in the academy as an energy source (Bell and Sinclair, 2014;Dorion, 2018;Lund and Tienari, 2019) with a powerful embodied and inter-corporeal potential.…”
Dance with us, on the dance-floor and with words, as we reenact our individual and shared tango autoethnographic experiences to develop an understanding of field inter-corporeality as a phenomenological experience of nakedness empowered by the transformational potential of eros. We write as we dance to discuss how eroticizing through the other’s presence our embodied nakedness, beyond sexual stereotypes, pushes us to meta-reflect on ourselves as organizational ethnographers and writers to reinvent our field and writing interactions as inter-corporeally relational and intersubjective. We problematize the sexual gaze that traditionally associates nakedness with shame and objectified vulnerability to stress the capacity of eroticizing our academic nakedness to enable free, embodied knowledge stripped of the traits of the dominant masculine academic order. In so doing, we join burgeoning autoethnographic and broader debates in the field of organization studies calling for the need to further unveil the embodied, erotic, and feminine aspects of organizational research and writing. Shall we dance?
“…We were inspired in our collective writing approach by 'Writing Resistance Together' (Ahonen et al, 2020). We also drew on Grenier (2015) as a model for constructing our shared autoethnography in a quasi-conversational form that expresses insights into our shared truths.…”
Adopting an intersectional feminist lens, we explore our identities as single and co‐parents thrust into the new reality of the UK COVID‐19 lockdown. As two PhD students, we present shared reflections on our intersectional and divergent experiences of parenting and our attempts to protect our work and families during a pandemic. We reflect on the social constructions of ‘masculinities’ and ‘emphasized femininities’ as complicated influence on our roles as parents. Finally, we highlight the importance of time and self‐care as ways of managing our shared realities during this uncertain period. Through sharing reflections, we became closer friends in mutual appreciation and solidarity as we learned about each other’s struggles and vulnerabilities.
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