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Barefoot Strangers: Multinational Digital Epistemologies of Academic Moms, Mamás, Mamy, Umahat
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Date
2023-01-01
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Abstract
This chapter seeks to recognize the ever-growing digital hyphen—understanding truths and knowledge construction—among the authors’ research, relationships, and critical reflections to uncover the meaning of this online academic path. This exploration is framed through a feminist lens to understand the phenomenon of the intersections of the authors’ research-mothering in a digital world. In these collective encounters, the positionality of knowledge is co-produced through context and experience, based on the poly-ethnographic methodology. Implications are presented as dialogue among co-authors with interwoven vignettes of their virtual experiences through their multi-hyphenated identities. This narrative is a collaborative effort of virtual sense-making. The authors reflect on and understand how the hyphens of their digital selves and virtual spaces morphed their identities as women, mothers, and academics during the pandemic. In a world of performance-based evaluation in academia, their time spent together discussing relationships invoked a more in-depth understanding of why they were drawn together in a third space and how they have stretched their epistemologies as mothers-academics. This new reality built a friendship and connection where all felt accepted and empowered to contribute to science in the hyphen as “barefoot”—“descalza”—“boso”—“hafiyyat al-qadamayn” academic mothers.