Blurred Boundaries

How the COVID-19 pandemic revealed gendered inequities in academic labor—and how to overcome them

Although the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 proved universally challenging, women, especially, found themselves caught between professional and familial responsibilities as work and homelife boundaries converged and collapsed. These gendered workplace struggles were not unique to the pandemic, but, rather, were exacerbated and exposed by the public health response. In Blurred Boundaries: Feminist Essays on Twenty-First-Century Academic Labor, scholars, teachers, and administrators pair eyewitness narratives with sustained interrogation of interminable labor inequities to demonstrate the ongoing dilemmas posed by gendered social and professional expectations.

Grounded in rhetoric and composition scholarship and feminist methodologies, contributors highlight systemic labor issues and suggest solutions to these embedded, ongoing problems. They pose critical questions regarding institutions' responsibilities for engaging intentional decision-making practices both to disrupt recurrent work imbalances and to support sustainable, ethically managed academic labor practices.