Immigrant academic mothers negotiating ideal worker and mother norms during the COVID-19 pandemic: Duoethnography as a co-mentoring tool for transformative learning
两位移民学术母亲通过个人随笔和六周密集日记，运用双人民族志方法相互指导，探讨疫情期间如何挑战理想工作者和母亲规范，实现工作与家庭身份的变革性学习。
How are immigrant academic mothers negotiating the confounding terrains of work and family during the pandemic? How can they support each other in learning how to resist the prevalent notions of ideal working and mothering amidst the demanding schedule of working remotely and parenting? This study addresses these questions through sharing a narrative of how two immigrant mothers in academia challenged and began the journey of transforming their gendered work and family identities. Building on personal essays and 6 weeks of extensive journaling that reflected our positionalities and experiences of motherhood, work-life, and intersections between work and home during the pandemic, we offer a fine-grained understanding of how we helped each other as co-mentors to identify moments of our lived experiences as triggers for transformative learning. In doing so, we realized how duoethnography could be more than just a research methodology in helping us co-construct a relational space to empathize and challenge each other's perspectives about our roles as mothers and professors and the gendered nature of social forces shaping those roles.