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Ingrid Bachmann, Arly Faundes, The Burden of Empathy and Blurred Boundaries, Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 14, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 311–314, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab022
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Extract
A lot has been said about this global pandemic and the transformed academic environments we now have. And yet much of this new scenario falls within well-known gendered lines of academic work and emotional labor that are widespread in different cultures around the globe, including our remote corner in South America. The complexities of the now very blurred lines between work and home have important gendered consequences.
Both of us work in the same school in Chile, but we have very different academic and personal lives (one of us is single, childless, up until a few months ago department chair, and teaching theory classes with 60 or so students; the other is married with children, junior faculty, teaching small skills classes). One year into this pandemic, while we are overall healthy, our bodies and our minds are worn-out.
We switched to online classes in mid-March 2020, just a week into our fall semester and amid an ongoing major socio-political crisis in this country that had already disrupted the end of the previous academic year (see Somma, Bargsted, Disi, & Medel, 2020). After a whole year of teaching remotely, we can say that, academically, it has been a good experience, despite the hits to our productivity in other arenas. Our students have met the planned learning outcomes and our teaching evaluations show that those enrolled in our classes were satisfied. That, however, has been at the expense of our time, affecting our workload, our downtime and even our sleep hours, more so than before. Women in academia already tackle more student and institutional service than men, spend more time on their teaching, and are often excluded from important decision-making (see Gardner, 2013; O’Meara, Kuvaeva, & Nyunt, 2017), and this pandemic has underscored the pervasiveness and scope of such gendered lines.
