Enter,the Chorus: An Ethnodrama of Academic Motherhood in (and Beyond) the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

How might ethnodrama (re)present ways that academic mothers responded to the collision of work/home, especially as it was intensified by virtual/electronic tools like Zoom? In 2021, we interviewed 54 academic mothers about their experiences in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. In hearing their stories, we became interested in the ways spaces were constructed for both privacy and/or accessibility, relative to what was (in)visible when on camera. Noting the interconnectedness of their experiences and work/home spaces, this paper elevates the possibilities of ethnodrama as humanizing methodological means of emphasizing the individual yet interconnected perspectives and lives for these academic mothers. Drawing inspiration from the Chorus, as a literary device grounded in ancient Greece and feminism, ethnodrama explores how these participants came to create spaces in relation to their roles as academic mothers. The resulting tale(s) and characters are, like dramatic Choruses, many and one: specific and universal, descriptive and interpretive, historical and prophetic.

Invocation

COLLECTIVE: Invocation. Enter the CHORUS, women, captives of war, weeping. (Euripides, The Trojan Women, l. 10).

Introduction

In spring 2021, we interviewed 54 academic mothers about their experiences mothering, living, and working in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. These virtual interviews produced a veritable chorus of stories, as the myriad roles carried and enacted by academic mothers shifted and conflated when the (albeit porous) boundaries of home and work vanished, seemingly overnight. Throughout the study, these mothers’ voices reverberated across geographic and academic contexts in ways that pushed us, as researchers, to consider how we could honor their words, their experiences, their challenges, and their joys. The study began as a relatively conventional study, with semi-structured virtual interviewing (Shelton, 2014; Shelton & Jones, 2022), but after we had sat together debriefing, our lives, thoughts, and emotions entangled in all that these mothers had shared, all that we had reciprocated, we struggled to continue to stick to methodological conventions for analysis and representation. This study demanded approaches that centered these mothers’ stories and overlapping home/work experiences, not as spliced and neatly organized codes or themes, but as often-messy, sometimes-beautiful, sometimes-painful, sometimes-funny, but always-interconnected remembrances and reflections of how (and where) they had experienced being an academic mother during and following the pandemic.

In previous work from this study, the richness of the stories entrusted to us have been analyzed using narrative (Guyotte et al., 2023) and poetic (Guyotte et al., 2024) inquiry methods. Here, however, we attend specifically to the ways that these mothers’ experiences and voices, over dozens of interviews, overlapped and amplified one another across the data. Again and again, mothers showed up in makeshift office spaces, piles of laundry alongside piles of books, and attics that offered quiet while threatening isolation. We needed a research method that attended to those connections in ways that honored individual perspectives while highlighting the meaningful interconnectedness of these mothers’ accounts and working/living spaces. Working to highlight the overlapping, enmeshed, and communal experiences of the mothers, this paper centers ethnodrama as a powerful methodological possibility. While we have other papers that focus on empirical findings from this research (e.g., Guyotte et al., 2023, 2024), here we specifically consider the affordances of ethnodrama as a creative and humanizing methodology that situates these mothers’ experiences and stories to speak and work collectively, in both unison and tension.

Thus, here we compose an ethnodrama, drawing inspiration from the theatrical Chorus—a device used by both ancient Greek playwrights and within Saidiya Hartman’s (2019) critical fabulation work. This decision was based on a desire to explore the ways in which both virtual and non-virtual spaces came to matter for academic mothers, with specific emphasis on the methodological possibilities and implications of having these mothers speak collectively. We composed this dramatic representation with the following research question in mind: “How might ethnodrama (re)present ways that academic mothers responded to the collision of work/home, especially as it was intensified by virtual/electronic tools like Zoom?” Drawing from a collective of feminist perspectives, we turned to Hartman, as well as Virginia Woolf (1929/1989) and Ursula K. Le Guin (1986/2020), to frame our exploration of how the women came to create spaces in relation to their roles as academic mothers, and we highlight ethnodrama as a method that made communicating these overlapping spaces, responsibilities, and realities possible and powerful.

In this article, we will focus our exploration in alignment with this journal’s focus, on the practices, politics, and philosophies of inquiry that undergird our critical and creative feminist study. We begin with more traditional elements expected in academic writing—a review of literature and details on our overarching research project. Then, after describing our study, we share our presentation of findings, which are in the form of a scripted performance, or an ethnodrama. The ethnodrama script features composite characters who were guided by (and serve as) our themes, comprising the voices of women in specific times/places/spaces, while also reflecting shared attributes of academic mothers, even across multiple geographies, different institutional types, different roles, encompassing diverse and intersectional identities, with one or multiple children, and. The script is reminiscent of one for a Greek Chorus: specific and global; individual and collective. We end with a discussion of both the academic and methodological implications of this work. Throughout, we interrogate how ethnodrama, used as a critical methodology centering participants’ challenging and marginalizing lived experiences, affords new means of understanding both how the pandemic, now years in the past, matters, and how more creative approaches to analyzing and presenting research might offer humanizing research practices and findings.

Enter now, the literature.

Academic Mothering

As evidenced in current scholarship, it has become increasingly clear that COVID-19 exacerbated issues that preceded the pandemic as academic mothers navigated between competing roles and responsibilities in a time when few boundaries existed (Burk et al., 2021; Flaherty, 2020; Hermann et al., 2021; Hicks-Roof, 2020). Certainly, many scholars have written about the fact that these challenges were not new, and that patriarchal structures, systems, and policies preceded the pandemic (Burk et al., 2021; Toffoletti & Starr, 2016). However, it was the intensification of these challenges that made this such a difficult time for academic mothers, who experienced (im)measurable impacts on their workloads and even scholarly productivity (Deryugina et al., 2021; Flaherty, 2020; Kitchener, 2020; Langin, 2021; Pinho-Gomes et al., 2020). Thus, when home and work collided during the pandemic, the typical (and relied upon) boundaries that provided some physical separation between these often competing roles and responsibilities no longer held. Harrop (2021) explains,

Working parents who had previously carved out clear boundaries between their professional identity and their role as a caregiver, suddenly found themselves working from home, with their children not only perpetually present, but now requiring attention, support, and in many cases, home-schooling. (p. 1)

Hicks-Roof (2020) echoes that, for academic mothers, “Having no distinct separate work and home spaces made it difficult to carve times specifically for work or caring for the children” (p. 269). Therefore, studies that explore this intensification are important in understanding not only what happened during this global pandemic, but how these were (and still are) issues faced by academic mothers.

While there are other scholars who have discussed the collisions of home and work and these blurred boundaries (e.g., CohenMiller & Leveto, 2022; Harrop, 2021; Martucci et al., 2022), we have found that very little research has discussed, in detail, the ways that working and living spaces came to matter for academic mothers. One notable exception is Adams et al. (2022) who used theory of practice architectures to explore how online and home formed new hybrid space configurations that accommodated the suddenly fluid nature of pandemic life. They explain,

In the hybrid space (online and face to face) there were few physical boundaries between family and work, and the needs and wants of established and new actors (family, students, and work colleagues) collided. (p. 344)

Attending to the shifting physical arrangements of home and work, these scholars shared their own experiences, as family and private spaces became new sites where home and work intermingled, and the “kitchen table prefigured new sayings, doings, and relatings as our academic identities and home lives collided while working and mothering” (p. 352).

The importance of the kitchen table notwithstanding, in this article we expand on existing literature to engage in an artful exploration of the construction of (other) spaces relative to both academic and mother identities. We were interested in learning about the ways spaces were thoughtfully constructed for privacy and/or accessibility, such as the ways that they were carefully curated to make certain things visible and/or invisible when on camera. Specifically, we wondered how academic mothers responded to the collision of work/home, especially as it was intensified by virtual/electronic tools like Zoom, and what the most effective way was to (re)present how these mothers’ experiences were simultaneously individual and collective. In what follows, first discuss how the Chorus and feminist theory interweave in our exploration of this question, before discussing the overarching study itself.

The Chorus

Originating in Ancient Greek theatre (Ley, 2007), the Chorus is a complex literary figure that generally has expected characteristics. Traditionally, the Chorus is many-in-one: (a) multiple people who compose (b) a “single” character (Ley, 2007). The Chorus is listed only as a collective figure, which speaks in unison with a single voice, moves together, and sometimes remains on stage as a group for the entirety of a play (Ley, 2007). At times, the Chorus may have an individual spokesperson, but this role is that of mouth-piece not separate personhood. Thus, “enter, the Chorus” references a singular, collective plural noun. In Madea, for instance, we only know that the members of the Chorus are “Corinthian women” (ln. 4). This one identification reinforces their collective role, prompting us to read and hear them as/from a communal perspective. Notably, the delivery of this shared perspective is a major function of the Chorus. Regularly, Choruses serve as narrators and/or truth-tellers, providing criticism, commentary, and context, guiding the audience’s engagement throughout the plot (Ley, 2007). Altogether, then, a Chorus is simultaneously defined by both its singularity (delivering a specific message from a shared identity/perspective) and plurality (as representing a collective group), while/as it contributes to defining the play’s structure and advancing its plot.

Hartman’s Chorus

Beyond these ancient origins, the Chorus occupies a central role in Hartman’s (2019) book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and functions as a figure of community and rebellious Black joy. In the face of the injustices committed towards Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (the subtitle of the text), Hartman foregrounds “the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal” that are embodied in the Chorus in its “acts of collaboration and improvisation” (p. 348) that enliven and enlarge the very spaces to which they are confined. There are many layers of careful work here. The historical context Hartman writes with is one in which many of these wom*n ¹ are, quite literally, working in the entertainment industry. They do so because of their dreams; they do so because they are not safe, free, or allowed elsewhere. Hartman writes, “the chorus bears all of it for us” as Chorus, with its Greek origins, means “dancing within an enclosure” (p. 347). As the Chorus dances/sings together on the stage and on the street, they are “the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which […] the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution. The chorus propels transformation” (Hartman, 2019, p. 348). Hartman attunes the reader’s ear to the sound: how, even now across time and space, these sounds continue. She helps us to hear the “riotous refrains, the street-corner compositions” that “are hard to explain or reduce to one thing, like a maternal song that makes you and marks you, yet is untranslatable” (p. 346, emphasis added). The song carries—echoes, gestates, sustains—and, as it does, “bear [ing]” us and a better world, “the chorus increases” (p. 348).

It is essential that we pause here to acknowledge that Hartman’s Chorus is written specifically in relation to Black and Brown wom*n, and that—although we recruited widely—our particular Chorus is largely (though not exclusively) white, cisgender, and heterosexual mothers. We consider our Chorus not as a version, and most definitely not as an alternative, of Hartman’s (2019) Chorus. Instead, ours is something like a footnote; a fan-letter or tribute, our work similarly emphasizes and critiques structures that create and maintain inequity. Our Chorus, then, is perhaps a sort of choir of god-daughters or family-friends. We heard the Chorus, with its righteousness and unrelenting voice, and we, affected, were welcomed to join in the struggle. This is the nature of the Chorus: to grow, to “excee[d] the words, the verses” (p. 346) and even its own boundaries. It is the “language of the riot” (p. 282, emphasis added), of all just riots, and it gathers its power from wrongs of all kinds on behalf of any who beg for the “shout” that “ma [kes] plain the truth” (p. 283). All of this is to say, then, that we write a Chorus as a partial but harmonizing echo, and we cannot hear it without hearing marginalized wom*n from Hartman’s book and beyond, even if we tried. We, who are born(e) by their rolling desires for a better world, will not. Hartman’s Chorus has never ended, and continues, haunting and stimulating time, “a picture of the world in all its beauty and death” (p. 348).

From Hartman (2019), therefore, we understand the Chorus to have several characteristics beyond (yet encompassing) those developed by Ancient Greek playwrights. To begin, it is (still) a communal and political vehicle, driven by anger, pain, justice, and desires. Like the Greek Chorus, Hartman’s (and our) Chorus is made up of everyday people—often women/wom*n—who push the plot forward; unlike the Greek Chorus, Hartman’s (and our) Chorus is not a side character, an accessory to the primary action. It is itself “an incubator of possibility, an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise” (p. 348) composed of wom*n (and all who are regularly silenced), it “carries” and “bears” its own. In this way, it is a sort of mother—sustaining lives, birthing new possibilities, producing itself as it gestates brighter futures. Additionally, while it may begin as a “practice of moving even when there [is] nowhere else [here, now] to go” (p. 299), it does not stay confined to the stage or page. It “make [s] the uninhabitable liveable” (p. 299). It refuses to occupy narrow worlds, “elude [ing] capture” (p. 299), revising demarcations, breaking down walls, and architecting spacious dwellings. The Chorus comes and goes, uninhibited by stage(d) boundaries. Etymologically, the Chorus, or Khoros, dances beyond others’ limits to speak the truth through and as a “movement for freedom” (p. 299). It combines voice and action, story and practice, and philosophy and activism.

Theoretical Framework

Our theoretical framework is also a Chorus of sorts. That is, we have endeavored to bring the voices of feminist scholars and writers together with the above literary and critical theorizations of the Chorus as a performative entity and device. Having already discussed the contributions of Hartman, here we add Virginia Woolf (1929/1989), and Ursula K. Le Guin (1986/2020) to the ensemble. Importantly, we did not predetermine the make-up of this Chorus. Instead, it has grown into its own collective as we have sat with the mothers’ stories. Thus, we “invited” thinkers into our theoretical Chorus as their contributions deepened our engagement; as they made the dimensionalities in the mothers’ experiences both more capacious and accessible; as their presence made certain elements—topic, tone, desires—resonate.

As we conceived of these academic mothers as a Chorus inspired by Hartman, Hartman’s Chorus led us to Le Guin. Le Guin, notably, also refashions an ancient Greek mainstay: the epic. Intimately intertwined with groups’ values, beliefs, and (mythical) histories, epics are understood, in part, as cultural origin and acculturation stories. Among other features, they are populated by men, marked by violence (the Iliad, for instance, opens by invoking a tale of Achilles’ rage), and often involve travel to or through far-flung locales. ² In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” Le Guin (1986/2020) laments that she was unable to find herself in such stories. In response, she imagines a carrier bag narrative. Such a story attends not to the weapons and hunting—predominantly the activities of men—but to women and their everyday overlooked labors. They are stories of gathering corn, of carrying water, of strapping the future (a baby) to your chest as you wash the blood from the hunter’s shirt. The carrier bag story, accordingly, decenters the grandiose and violent masculinities of the war hero and acknowledges the necessary day-to-day mundanities that have enabled our origin stories. That sustain.

Part of how Le Guin (1986/2020) conceptualizes the carrier bag story is by focusing on the practical necessity of objects that carry, such as pots, bowls, and woven bags. Simple entities, they work because of how they allow humankind to manipulate space. A canteen, for instance, is able to hold water precisely because it is a capsule of sorts. The same can be said of a house: it provides shelter as a result of being hollow. The same, too, might be said of an office or office-at-home. This brought us to Woolf’s (1929/1989) A Room of One’s Own, in which she memorably argues that, for a woman, intellectual labor requires “a room of her own” (p. 52). The problem, Woolf writes, is that “women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time” (p. 106); if they even have a room, it is very often “out of the question” that it is “a quiet room or a sound-proof room” (p. 54). Space, silence, opportunity: these are sustenance for “intellectual freedom” (p. 106) and thus creation.

Thus, to the Chorus we add Le Guin and Woolf. We carry this list with us in our analysis: the quiet office, the mundane story, the riotous Chorus of the oppressed who refuse to remain still and silent. These are the conditions for the sort of work whereby the world grows more equitable, capacious, generous, and generative. Whereby “collective action […] propels transformation” (Hartman, 2019, p. 348), and all find themselves represented in the stories of what it means to be human.

The Study

Upon hearing Kelly—an academic mother—express her frustrations, joys, and anxieties of managing the responsibilities of both home and work several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the “collective action” undertaken by this article’s authors resulted in a study on the experiences of academic mothers when home and work collided during this time. At the time of the interviews, Kelly, mother to two, was a relatively new associate professor of qualitative research; Shelly, mother of five, was finishing her doctorate. Not mothers, but versed in academic mothering practices, Carlson was a doctoral student, and Stephanie—an assistant professor—was preparing her tenure case. The four of us developed a qualitative study that included virtual semi-structured interviews (Roulston, 2010) with those who identified as academic mothers and who were employed by academic institutions in the United States during the COVID-19 lockdowns of early 2020. With ethics board approval, our online recruitment (via private Facebook groups and emails to colleagues at different institutions) ultimately involved interviewing 54 academic mothers for 40–120 min each, with timeframes based on participants’ availability and circumstances. These interviews were initially transcribed using Zoom features, which we then cleaned and checked against the audio.

Methodology

Firmly planted in the intersectional feminist conceptual frameworks discussed above, this inquiry draws inspiration from arts-based research practices (Leavy, 2018), specifically centering and employing ethnodrama. While ethnotheatre results in a live performance based on a research study’s findings, ethnodrama is a written script, or a “dramatizing [of] the data” (Saldaña, 2005, p. 2). Denzin (2018) explains, “Ethnodramas examine moments of crisis in the culture, liminal moments, suspended in time. They open up institutions and their practices for critical inspection” (p. 456). He goes on, “the artistic project is not only aesthetic, it possesses ‘emancipatory potential’ for motivating social change within participants and audiences” (p. 456). Ethnodrama, then, is an appropriate form of (re)presentation for these findings due to the critical goals articulated by Denzin, as well as “creating a venue in which emotional connections and closeness of data and experience are highlighted” (Ares, 2016, p. 603). Furthermore, turning to ethnodrama allows us to elevate the Chorus as a literary device and necessary figure in this critical inquiry.

Analysis

The initial construction of the ethnodrama from the academic mother transcripts was guided by the following questions, based on topics that these women introduced again and again—its own Chorus of repeating experiences: How did academic mothers talk about virtual/electronic tools like Zoom and their laptops? How did Zoom affect their experiences, as home identities and spaces were forced to accommodate work? How did these academic mothers respond?

Through engaging in reading as analysis (Guyotte & Shelton, 2025), we read through the data corpus of transcripts, “accentuating and troubling connections” between the mothers’ varied accounts (p. 77). Grounded in feminist tenets, we read while centering personal experiences and bringing “to the fore the personhood and wholeness of [these mothers by] highlighting the relational processes between individual” accounts (Sultan, 2019, p. 3). In attending to these connections, we noted how often mothers referenced their physical surroundings and how those rooms and objects (re)defined their roles as academics/mothers. Rereading with attention to collective accounts of literal spaces, we identified three patterns, which the participants often anthropomorphized into characters. Honoring their perspectives, these concepts became three “characters” for us, too: (1) the space-(re)maker (the Carpenter), (2) the wanderer (the Nomad), and (3) the space “mis-director” (the Illusionist). Having established and named these characters, we excerpted data specifically related to these three characters. These figures reverberated across the data and mothers’ accounts, emphasizing the collective nature of these experiences and these figures.

Because these characters were composed of many mothers’ contributions, serving as a Chorus of experiences, needs, and hard truths, we wove their interviews together into a collective voice, creating a composite script for each of the three characters, with each character’s dialogue being its own Chorus of voices. Each section’s script weaves together the voices of “individuals,” who are actually composed of multiple voices/perspectives and of a collective, unified Chorus, with the Chorus existing as and stepping in-between the three characters. In the ethnodrama below, we present our script focused on the structure and figure of the Greek Chorus, guided by conventions from Greek playwrights and Hartman’s renegotiation of the Chorus. Here, we (re)design the Chorus, simultaneously preserving and resisting two key aspects of the chorus: (1) its singular-plurality and (2) its relationship between identity/ies and role/s.

As the characters in our Chorus are composites of our participants, no one participant is truly an individual. We could not feature all 54 of the academic mothers in this article and, in order to write a cohesive drama, we took careful, reasonable artistic liberties. Thus, we wrote about the events and spaces the mothers discussed in their interviews, aiming to honor nuance while threading it all together meaningfully. The resulting tale(s) and characters are, like dramatic Choruses, many and one—both specific and universal, descriptive and interpretive, historical and prophetic. Our ethnodrama does not just convey our understandings; it performs them.

Enter, The Chorus: The Performance

The Cast

THE CHORUS: Anita, Deidre, Tiffany, Liza, Kennedy, Martha, Athena, Riley, Blair, Callie, Charlie, Sonia, Sybil, Jeannie, Zoe, Carlson, Stephanie, Shelly, Kelly

COLLECTIVE: Enter a CHORUS, the old citizens of Thebes, changing as the sun begins to rise. (Sophocles, Antigone, ln. 116)

MARTHA: I don’t like the word old, but I sure feel tired.

CALLIE: [Sighs] Me too. [Laughs] At least they got the sun-rise right. I’m up, coffee in hand, at least by 6:00 am.

Act 1, The Carpenter

COLLECTIVE: Act 1. The Carpenter. One who constructs, creates dwellings, transforms spaces into living and work spaces; one who builds places for living and its tasks.

LIZA: My husband gets the kids up so I can try and get an extra 30 minutes of sleep. He knows I stayed up til god-knows-when. That 30 minutes is great but…

BLAIR: I can only find quiet time to work late in the night, so I squirrel myself away in the attic. That’s the only space I could carve out of my house for work. Anyway, my neighbors thought I accidentally left the light on all night, and texted me. I promptly responded: ‘No, I’m up, that’s me, shining, burning the midnight oil.’

COLLECTIVE: “We were ready to take hot iron in our hands, Walk through fire, swear by all the gods…” (Sophocles, Antigone, ln. 223-224).

DEIDRE: [Laughs] I get it – no sane person works at this time, right? I think that nightly, morningly, at 3:00 am, as I am rocking my crying baby in the dark nursery, my face illuminated blue with the glow of emails I’m returning. I’m awake, so I might as well use the time, right?

ATHENA: Use the time – yes. I feel like that’s all I think about these days. How to use my time and space on purpose. A friend offered to keep my kids so I could, like, shower, take a nap, breathe. I took her up on it, but I spent half the time working. I was actually in the shower – which is the only ‘me’ place I get anymore – when I got several phone calls. I answered, thinking it was an emergency. It was my department chair. I hadn’t replied to a student email within 24 hours, and she reported me. I laughed, and said, ‘Do you have any idea where I am right now?’

COLLECTIVE: “Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. [...] If anything comes through in spite of all of this, it is a miracle [...] But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question…. ” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 51–52)

TIFFANY: I can’t believe she reported you for that!

ATHENA: Yeah. Sometimes it feels like work expects to dictate your ‘not-work’ time, too, you know? Even the time and spaces you have set aside for yourself, your health and sanity. But, Blair, did I hear you right – you made yourself an office in the attic? Wow. Did you put a desk up there and everything?

BLAIR: Yeah. I just embraced it. It’s not ideal but it serves the purpose. I mean, I’ve got to clean off the animal droppings every once in a while, and I try not to think about that. But, it’s worth it to have a room. To be able to close the door. To not be overheard, walked in on, interrupted. Out of sight, out of mind, you know?

TIFFANY: Oh yeah, I totally do. I had several workshops during the summer, and I spent them in my bedroom. I put a sign on the door – a big stop sign – to remind my husband and kids not to come in. Sometimes it works…

COLLECTIVE: “…a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself…” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 106)

KENNEDY: I love the big stop sign. I should try that. I claimed the guest room, that we had just gotten ready for my parents to visit. I moved the extra bed to storage, stole stuff from the rest of the house, and bought cheap furniture – a desk, a chair, a bookshelf, a plant – to make me feel human. It’s a space to work, but I also find myself distracted and sad, thinking of what I had hoped life would be, of what this room was planned for. Of who it was planned for.

LIZA: We bought a new house for the space. (Softly) It had a room for a second nursery. It remains empty.

MARTHA: We moved at the beginning of the pandemic, and we set up an ‘office space’ [in] the dining room. My husband and I share it, desk to desk. In fact, if I was to turn my screen, you’d see all his stuff, right there. We both chose this room ‘cause there is actually a glass door. So we’ve set up a play area for our toddler right outside the room, which is actually supposed to be a living room. But, this is the only way we can watch her and do work.

ANITA: It’s hard to both be working in the same space. I was trying to work at the kitchen table, but it just didn’t work. My husband was super kind and moved some of his stuff in his office so I could set up beside him. It works most of the time, and one of us can go in the other room to sit on the couch when the other is in meetings or whatever. But there’s no door. We put up like a screen for privacy, but it’s nowhere near soundproof. It feels like we’re still on top of each other. Why did open floor plans become so popular anyway? You can hear everything!

COLLECTIVE: “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 108)

CHARLIE: Yes! I’m worried about that. I do my best to work when my kids aren’t around, so they don’t run into [the] background of the screen. My department chair has made it clear that ‘kids’ aren’t an excuse for rescheduling meetings or making class scheduling requests. A lot of my work is on sensitive subject matter, and I have to record my lessons. I don’t want my kids to hear or to pop in, so I’ve actually turned a hall closet into my office. Though ‘turned’ is generous. I put a light in there; tried to make the background presentable. It’s pretending to be an office. Playing make-believe, at best, like I am. (Laughs)

CALLIE: Open floor plans definitely make it harder to work. We don’t have an extra office or empty room, so I’ve tried to make myself a space in the living room. Thankfully, the babysitter can still come once or twice a week. Since I can’t carve out space, I carve out time – those golden hours! But, they’re honestly too few for what I have to do. I wish I was out of eyesight. Some days, I hear ‘Momma, can I have goldfish? Mom! I’m thirsty!’ every 10 minutes.

COLLECTIVE: “I thought of [...] the shut doors of the library; and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in…” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 24)

Act 2, The Nomad

COLLECTIVE: Act 2, The Nomad. One who travels, rather than settles; one who moves from workspace to homespace; one who finds space and time according to the seasons and day-by-day.

ZOE: When the pandemic started, I just took the guest bedroom as a workspace. I struggled to make my laptop fit on the desk. But then my partner needed this space. My day is less structured, you see. So, I moved. Carried my laptop with me. Now I go up and down the stairs if I’m not teaching. Sometimes I sit on the chair in the living room and work. Sometimes I come down here to the basement. I travel, depending on what I’m doing and what I need to do.

SYBIL: Yes, the traveling [sighs]. I carry my laptop everywhere. I eat breakfast in the kitchen in front of my laptop. That didn’t happen before the pandemic. I’ll take my laptop into the bedroom. You can bring your work anywhere, right? It’s not like you just leave it in another room and close it down for the night. Not anymore. It can travel with me, anywhere I go.

BECKY: All of that walking feels like a tightrope walk sometimes. (Struggles to balance in a path across the floor, juggling a laptop, a small child, a phone, and a book. Sits on the floor, deflated, tired.)

COLLECTIVE: “A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 43)

ATHENA: You’re right that work can travel anywhere now. Inside, outside, alone, with my family. My husband’s job makes him travel, even during the pandemic, so I am pretty much the sole caretaker of my three kids. It’s hard doing that in addition to my work. I have to double-up on time when I can. We will go on a walk, maybe, cause I need that too, but then the kids will play outside and I’ll take a call on my iPad.

JEANNIE: You know, even as I travel, my husband seems to take up SO MUCH SPACE. He’s up and down all the time. He’s out of his chair. He’s walking in the kitchen. He’s back in his chair. He’s walking back and forth. That’s how he works. He’s only one person, but it feels like he’s everywhere. So I have to be anywhere. I’m looking for my own space, my own room. I can still get my job done no matter where I am. I occupy the space that is my laptop. It’s a nomadic way of working. So I’m just kind of a nomad, I think, by default.

CHARLIE: “The burden you carry in your hands is heavy, But it is not all: you will find more in your house.”

(Sophocles, Antigone, ln 999-1000).

DEIDRE: My desk is made of wicker. Have you ever tried working on a wicker desk? It’s practically unusable. Laughably so. What kind of work do they expect you to get done on a wicker desk, anyway? I inherited it from my mother. My friend had one as a little girl. She said it was lovely, but it was an exceedingly impractical choice for a desk. The surface is so uneven, and it is full of holes; you can only use it for writing if you first cover it with glass, and I don’t have glass anymore. I guess it broke a long time ago. So I have a desk I can’t use; I’m working anywhere but there.

KENNEDY: [Laughs] I get the ‘anywhere but there’. Even though I say I ‘claimed’ the guest room, the truth is that that was only for a small portion of the pandemic. Now, my kids use it for online school. So I find myself taking my lap desk and working wherever I can sit, get internet, and find quiet. I’ve worked on the front porch, in the car, beside the fridge on the floor, in my laundry room, on my bed, sitting on the bathroom counters…

COLLECTIVE: “What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact–that she is Mrs. Martin, aged thirty-six, dressed in blue, wearing a black hat and brown shoes; but not losing sight of fiction either–that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually….” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 44)

SYBIL: I have a lap desk, too. I use it to work and also to eat. I balance plates of spaghetti on it, change the baby on it, make to-do and grocery lists on it. I use it so often, I can never remember what room it is in when I go look for it. I have to look everywhere. Same with my work bag. I stuff it full of stuff: books, my laptop and charger, my planner, breast pumping materials, diapers and baby wipes, snacks. It’s this big massive bag so you think it would be hard to lose. But, I take it everywhere cause it holds everything and so I never know where I left it last. (Laughs.) It’s like, together, my lap desk and bag are my office.

LIZA: I invested in an iPad when the pandemic started. I had been wanting one for a while, but it was so expensive. But, I was worried about being able to work from home and get stuff done. So I carry it with me everywhere I go. It is my work, I swear.

ANITA: Portability is so important to surviving this time. I share an office with my husband like I said. But, that really only works when we don’t have Zoom meetings at the same time. And, if our kid’s school is closed (and it has been a lot ‘cause of outbreaks), we have to do this dance of ‘Who has more important meetings today, and who can do their meetings in the dining room or the living room or outside, while watching the kid?’ I’m constantly moving my stuff around so I can just do what I gotta do to work and be mom and be a human being.

COLLECTIVE: “What one wants, I thought [...] is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking [...] what, in short, [she] did from eight in the morning till eight at night.” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 45).

Act 3, The Illusionist

COLLECTIVE: Act 3, The Illusionist. One who transforms the appearance of reality in order to portray a different image of the world; one who cannot affect the world in real ways, only seeming to alter space.

TIFFANY: I always felt really weird about the fact that I was Zooming in my bedroom. So I made sure that the background was always really clean and non-descript, basic. It could be anywhere. But, on the other side of the screen, there are piles of laundry, family photos everywhere, children’s toys, my husband’s workout gear…

CHARLIE: I get that totally. There was a week a couple months ago where one of my kids’ schools closed down for COVID. So even though I had a little ‘closet office,’ I couldn’t use it, ‘cause I had to be watching my child. And, of course, it was a week where we had meetings every day. So, I set up my computer in the kitchen, and distracted my kid with toys and food and TV. I made sure that the counters that you could see in the video were pristine, but the sink was full of dishes and there were wrappers everywhere.

COLLECTIVE: “To raise bare walls out of the bare earth was the utmost they could do.” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 23)

RILEY: I didn’t really want my work to be barging into my house. It made me feel uncomfortable. So I always put on one of those fake screens. It usually worked fine. But, one day, my husband was supposed to be watching our toddler, and I guess he escaped and came running in, pants around his ankles, yelling ‘Mommy, I poop, I poop!’ interrupting a department meeting. And I was mortified. My colleagues were super nice and laughed about it. But, I felt like, I don’t know, like the carefully curated, professional image I had portrayed was shattered?

BECKY: Oh yes, I know entirely what you mean. It’s always been important to me that I separate life and work. But, I don’t know, right now, it’s inseparable. I keep my camera off when I can, especially if the meeting isn’t super important, and I’m careful to contribute every so often. But, half the time, I’ve got a child bouncing in my lap, or I’m racing behind another one trying to convince them to put their shoes on. I feel like my life is a circus, and I’m the only one that sees what it’s like outside of the ring and behind the curtain.

ANITA: Thank the gods for being able to turn the camera off! I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been on a Zoom call with a student and also making my family eggs, or feeding the chickens, or scraping up half-melted crayons from the carseat.

LIZA: Ugh, yes. Cameras and phones and laptops are wonderful and terrible. It’s nice to see people’s faces, but my mom wants to Facetime, and I’m always like ‘okay, but I’ve got to be walking around the house picking up stuff.’ And I’m SO tired of explaining to my mom – she’s always been a stay-at-home mom – what I could possibly need to be doing at 7:00 pm, why I can’t focus on her? It’s like, ‘Mom, I’d love to have a margarita with you and chat like things are fine, but to be honest, I’m barely keeping it together, and I need every moment I can get.’

KENNEDY: (Gently touches Liza’s arm) I feel that. I can barely focus on my children and my spouse. Other people, even family members? Maybe. Myself ? (Scoffs) Never! But, it’s funny, cause the people who have been most understanding for me are other academic mothers on Facebook. We support each other, virtually, even though we’ve never met.

DEIDRE: Yes! I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gotten a message from another academic mom I met online in the middle of the night. We text each other while we’re up, sitting in the rocking chair in the wee hours of the night. It makes me feel a little less lonely, a little more connected. A little more understood.

ZOE: I love that. But, also, I just want to know: when will I be able to do my life one-thing-at-a-time? I daydream about that. A day where I don’t need to be seven people [at once]: teacher, researcher, mother, wife, lunchroom worker, counselor, bus driver. Is that a fantasy? Has it always been a fantasy? Am I looking for an impossible life?

COLLECTIVE: “Chorus: You went too far, the last limits of daring–Smashing against the high throne of Justice!

Your life’s in ruins, child–I wonder…

Do you pay for your father’s terrible ordeal?” (Sophocles, Antigone, ln 943-946)

Coda

Scene: The curtains close, but a spotlight remains directed at center stage, as offstage voices echo through the theatre.

KELLY: “The song lines, the riotous refrains, the street-corner compositions are hard to explain or reduce to one thing, like a maternal song that makes you and marks you, yet is untranslatable….” (Hartman, 2019, p. 346)

CARLSON: “The story exceeds the words, the verses. All the things secreted, harbored deep inside are felt and exclaimed. It is all so terrible and so beautiful” (Hartman, 2019, p. 346).

SHELLY: “The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within an enclosure” (Hartman, 2019, p. 347).

STEPHANIE: “The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities and everyday actions play a part,

KELLY: where the communal group indices change,

CARLSON: where mutual action provides resources for collective action,

SHELLY: where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution.

STEPHANIE: The chorus propels transformation.

KELLY: It is an incubator of possibility,

CARLSON: an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.

SHELLY: Somewhere down the line, the numbers increase, the chorus’s volume swells.

STEPHANIE: “The chorus increases” (Hartman, 2019, p. 348).

The Possibilities of Ethnodrama

In this discussion, we return to our research question—“How might ethnodrama (re)present ways that academic mothers responded to the collision of work/home, especially as it was intensified by virtual/electronic tools like Zoom?”—to unpack the ways in which the ethnodrama above explores the collisions of home and work, as well as how academic mothers responded relative to the spaces that they created (and curated) while having to manage virtual work. In what follows, we discuss the affordances of using ethnodrama as a methodology and (re)presentation of our findings, focusing on the ways in which the Chorus, as both “individuals” and collective, served as form and function in elevating the communal challenges storied across the interviews.

Pulling from interviews conducted with academic mothers, the ethnodrama we wrote is organized according to our “themes”—three conceptualizations/characterizations of how the academic mother participants framed the ways that they curated both virtual and physical spaces in their homes, assuming the identity/ies of the Carpenter, Nomad, and/or Illusionist. It is important to note here that, while many mothers tended toward one of these, others also flexibly and iteratively adopted these strategies according to the needs of each hour, day, and season. Thus, these identities are not static but fluid within and across the mothers. An affordance of using ethnodrama as a methodology, we found, was the ability to emphasize the collectiveness of the challenges and issues faced by the academic mothers whom we interviewed, both through elevating the similarities between their stories and emphasizing shared elements through the Chorus as a literary device.

Beginning with the similarities across stories, composing the ethnodrama led us to an awareness that space mattered to these academic mothers as they sought places within their homes in which to work either/both (dis)connected from/to their mothering responsibilities—rendering them visible and/or invisible (Guyotte et al., 2023). They told us repeatedly that where they were located in their homes mattered, especially since parts of their homes were often on display via video conferencing. Thus, the spaces from which they were speaking to us were often the very spaces they created and curated for their work, storying to us how they were deeply affected by the collisions of their identities and roles as academic mothers in material, physical ways. While other studies have demonstrated the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 work-from-home on women (e.g., Goldin, 2022; Power, 2020; Peetz et al., 2022), our analysis underscored the strategic (and creative) ways in which mothers approached fashioning and negotiating work spaces in their homes that worked for them. Time and time again, COVID-19 required a re-envisioning of work spaces, often (and almost exclusively) working around their partners and children, sometimes taking what was left (e.g., closets, wicker desks, and bedrooms). Their stories, then, were both collective and communal, entwined with the myriad and intersectional identities assumed by academic mothers.

In relation to the affordance of ethnodrama via the Chorus, there was power in emphasizing collective experiences and understandings. When the Chorus speaks, they speak with each other and to a wider, often less-aware audience. Unlike the ancient Chorus, however, our Chorus relied on the individual as necessary to the collective because it is made up of identified (though composite) characters—the stories of actual academic mothers. Specifically, the Chorus’s contribution to the performance is to provide commentary, to operate as the truth teller, especially for those who cannot speak. The Chorus is a wise, observant figure, offering insight and guidance that—if heeded—might (re)shape possibilities and fates. Playing with these features, we write this Chorus in relation to the experiences described by these women: notably, their in/visibility, their experiences of isolation and community, and the ways they were both defined by their roles and (re)negotiated them (Guyotte et al., 2022). Like the ancient Chorus, our Chorus provides context and insight, as it speaks in a collective voice.

Coda

Overall, this study invokes new ways of thinking, both for academia generally and for researchers specifically. First, while this paper did not focus on the findings themselves, they are still here and remain important. Higher education must hear and understand the experiences of academic mothers as told through their individual and collective stories. Though COVID-19 lockdowns are now etched into our memories, the communal experiences and curations of space by academic mothers did/do not go away. After all, when a play has concluded, the Chorus is still there; it does not cease to exist. Similarly, the careful curation of spaces that render certain things visible and others invisible (Guyotte et al., 2023) are an ongoing part of academic mothering life; even if the collisions of work and home are less extreme (or perhaps more normalized), they are present through times like sick days, school closures (both expected and unexpected), and caregiving emergencies. As Burk et al. (2021) explain, COVID-19 made it so that “motherhood can no longer be invisible in academia, making academic motherhood less about balancing and more about establishing arbitrary, yet desired, boundaries in their homes and lives” (p. 227). Although the pandemic is years past now, the implications for the pandemic remain and have had significant effects on academic mothers’ professional trajectories (Bam et al., 2023; Gregor et al., 2023; Minello et al., 2021; Rutter et al., 2024). Research studies and lived experiences highlight the ways that a post-pandemic academia has, in many ways, extended the challenges for academic mothers rather than resolved them. With online meeting platforms widely available but the lockdown over, there is a sense of perpetual availability that is exhausting for all academics but particularly for academic mothers who—as the pandemic highlighted—are often the ones managing sick children and household responsibilities. Rather than continue to push responsibility onto individual academic mothers to figure out how to make work work, we urge higher education institutions to take responsibility for the ways that they contribute to the presence and persistence of inequities of labor enacted by academic mothers (CohenMiller & Leveto, 2022; Harrop, 2021).

Second, as we call for new possibilities and futures for academic mothers, we also push for new methodological approaches, including creative engagements with and (re)presentations of data. There are ranges of powerful implications as/if researchers consider how more creative methodologies might work and communicate findings differently than more familiar approaches. There are moments when more conventional methods are insufficient to fully engage with the affective complexities participants share and accentuate. In our study, we realized that the overlapping, individual yet communal, lived experiences of these mothers demanded that we explore and (re)present our research in ways that we had not initially planned. Part of the point of engaging in humanizing research should be exploring how methodologies open new possibilities in not just the data themselves, but in the ways that we work to know and share those data with others. Ethnodrama afforded us new opportunities to communicate the ways that these mothers’ interviews were undeniably unique yet perpetually interwoven. Methodologies are arguably a different sort of Chorus, with ranges of voices, topics, and findings, all moving individually yet collectively to advance fields of inquiry and new possibilities for how and what we know. To return to the etymology of “Chorus,” or Khoros, Choral groups dance beyond known and established limits to speak powerfully and vulnerably through and as a “movement for freedom” (Hartman, 2019, p. 299). A Chorus, including the possibility of a methodological one, combines voice and action, story and practice, and philosophy and activism and opens new onto-epistemological possibilities for what research is and might be.

(In)Conclusion

COLLECTIVE: “For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice” (Woolf, 1929/1989, p. 65).

The Chorus continues.