The Liminality of Multinational Muslim MotherScholaring during COVID-19: A Feminist Collaborative Autoethnography

ABSTRACT Current life in the US under the COVID-19 pandemic makes visible the fragility of supportive structures for academics with childcare responsibilities. Particularly academic mothers are left grappling with the impact of social and institutional shifts that took place due to the global pandemic. We, two early career multinational and Muslim MotherScholars, ask ourselves how these shifts are affecting our own entanglements of scholarship, job market navigation, motherhood, childcare responsibilities and routines, family traditions, and religious observation through feminist autoethnography. We used the concept of “liminal space” as our theoretical foundation. Data were collected through journal entries and analytic memos, and four vignettes were composed to (re)present the analysis. The vignettes display how Western dominant and nondominant spaces inform the ways in which the authors’ identities are interloped, muted, contested, and thrown into tension with changing social and institutional expectations during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research has implications for higher education administrators who wish to gain a glimpse into the lived experiences and barriers of their international, Muslim, mothering employees, and for MotherScholars who live through similar complex and shifting identities to see validation and representation.