Parenting at the Intersections in the Academy
By: National Center For Institutional Diversity
Tags: Series, Motherhood, Life Lessons, Parenting, Higher Education

This series was curated by Dr. Larissa Mercado-Lopez, associate professor of women’s studies at California State University, Fresno.

Historically, the academy has not been a welcoming space for parents — particularly for parents who are women, students, and people of color. Collections such as Mothers in Academia and The Chicana M(other)work Anthology, and media outlets such as The Chicana M(other)work Podcast, have worked to make visible the lives of academic parents by documenting the ways in which mothers, particularly marginalized mothers, experience hostility and disempowerment on their campuses and in their fields. While institutions tout their commitment to work/life balance or work/life integration, many parents remain frustrated when institutions fail to implement actual performative policies or create culture-shifting language that empower parents and hold others accountable to supporting this institutional commitment. Hence, parents remain saddled with the burden of encouraging and advocating for others to uphold the commitment. As the contributors in this series express, this burden is compounded by the experiences of being a parent at the intersections of multiple identities--race, ethnicity, class, gender, sex, first generation status, ability, sexuality, etc.--that have already, and continue to, reify their marginalization within the academy. In response, marginalized academic parents have worked to fortify themselves through community-building, creative and non-traditional family arrangements, and activism within their institutions and scholarship.

As the contributors in this series write, both the demands of academia and parenthood make it difficult to reconcile parent and scholar identities. The irony is that, particularly for faculty, certain characteristics of the profession--flexible work days, medical leave (not always paid), days off for most holidays and summer and breaks, health insurance, etc.--are what make the job worth having and are what allow for academic parents to have family lives. But as the contributors also demonstrate, the “benefits” of faculty positions do not benefit parents in the same way; thus, academic parents have long been creative in how they draw from resources, family, and each other, to create community, safety nets, and professional opportunities to support their academic journeys. Importantly, they have insisted on making their lives visible: from the challenges they experience as parents to the deep feelings of love that inform their pedagogy and inspire their politics, academic parents are increasingly showing up in the fullness of who they are and are demanding that their institutions recognize how their practices suppress those complexities and, thus, the assets and knowledges shaped by those experiences. In fact, for many of us, it has been the experience of becoming a parent and raising children that has most effectively sharpened the critical edge of our scholarship and nurtured the empathetic depth of our teaching.

It is clear: Institutions do not have to look far beyond academic parents themselves for solutions. Parents have ample suggestions for ways that institutions can create transformative change that remedy the inequities and marginalization that parents experience on campus; in fact, scholars such as Whitney Pirtle and I have written about specific ways that institutions can support faculty and student parents. As a mother of color of four children, an associate professor, and a former student parent, I can attest that an empowered parent is an empowered academic--that I can only show up in the fullness of my academic-self when my mother-self is welcomed to that space, as well.

To support the momentum of ongoing conversations and activism around academic parents, I am proud to present this series of pieces on parenting in the academy--and more specifically, mothering in the academy, as all contributors are women. These essays speak to the struggles and the opportunities of parenting at the intersections and, importantly, offer suggestions for best practices for campus leaders and faculty, staff, and student allies. First, in her powerful piece, Claudia Garcia-Louis speaks to the limitations of the academy and her own academic training in higher education studies for preparing her for the challenges motherhood would pose to her academic identity, ultimately finding inspiration and strength in her “Haitican” (Haitian-Mexican) children. Drawing upon her expertise as a sociologist, Angela M. Johnson discusses the cumulative effects of race, gender, and socioeconomic status on her experiences parenting in the academy and offers lessons for her children inspired by her efforts to navigate the academy. Assistant professor Victoria Reyes lays bare the “perils” and academic risks of being a mother of color on the tenure track while also importantly balancing her critique with the “promises” of academic motherhood, asking us to consider the generational impact of supporting parents and therefore their children. Through their four suggestions for creating awareness of parenting and caregiving issues on campus, colleagues May Hara and Maria Alessandra Bollettino share with us the process of creating faculty/staff/student working groups to hold critical conversations about caregiving, connect parents and caregivers to resources, and advocate for change. In our desire to include as many single-parent voices as we could, we posed questions to four single parents, Vanessa Fonseca-Chavez, Trish Martinez, Joan Doris, and Christina Wilson, whose insights urge us to think about the assumptions that are made about academic parents and how those assumptions and their embeddedness in institutional practices uniquely and further marginalize those that are single. Lastly, modeling an ethics of hope and community, The Chicana M(other)work Collective gives us an overview of their journey to form their activist collective for the purposes of making visible the lives of mothers, finding individual agency, and working collectively to transform institutions and the academy through their activism and mother-centered scholarship.

— Larissa Mercado-Lopez, Associate professor of women’s studies at California State University, Fresno