December 21 2024

Guide for the Guild

compassThe Guide for the Guild is a series of blogs posts submitted by AAR members in response to the Status on Women in the Profession Committee's work-life balance project. To learn more, visit SWP's page on the AAR website.

Female Graduate Students, Power Dynamics, and Work-Life Balance

December 18, 2017

by Kristy Slominski, University of Mississippi

two women

To contribute to the ongoing discussions initiated by the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession about power dynamics within academia and the elusive quest for work-life balance, I have been asked to address how these issues intersect with the experiences of female graduate students. Of course, I cannot speak for all of the amazing women and varied experiences within this group, but I did spend considerable time during graduate school looking into these issues and speaking with students as a member of the AAR’s Graduate Student Committee and later as the student director elected to the Board of Directors. I also served as a student representative within the Western Region of the AAR and helped to create their Graduate Student and Professional Development Unit.

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How Parenting Has Changed the Way I Teach (and Sometimes Vice Versa)

June 23, 2017

by Cassie Hillman Trentaz, Warner Pacific College

child's hand with a crayon coloring line images of hats in many colors

My partner and I moved from Chicago, IL, to Portland, OR, more than 1000 miles away from our families for a one-class-per-semester adjunct teaching gig when I was nearly seven months pregnant.

Please, hold your applause. Yes, we are obviously geniuses.

Opportunity had emerged in Portland that seemed worth exploring. We were invited to come and participate in a college that was reinventing its relationship to context, neighborhood, and questions of what it means to be faithful and responsible in this here and now. I wanted in on that. That first year, I gave birth, finished and successfully defended my dissertation, and taught those two classes for a whopping $3,000 total income for our family of three. Gratefully, at the end of that year, a full-time teaching position opened and I got the job. (You can breathe now.)

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It’s Not All About Me

April 4, 2017

by Anonymous

Interior of Budapest train station

A new chapter of my life started a few weeks ago with sudden changes—loss of an important romantic relationship and the death of a beloved friend. It was indeed quite a lot to digest all at the same time. I’m still digesting with much less indigestion than before, but nevertheless chewing at the changes.

I’ve travelled… a lot. I just turned fifty this year, and during this glorious lifetime I’ve had the good fortune to visit over 60 countries on all the continents (except for the polar ones). I’ve spent the past couple of years trying to settle down in one spot. And I’ve made some decisions about where to stay and work that didn't go so well. So I moved some more. In fact, since the 2000, I’ve moved fifteen times between seven countries.

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Finding Normalcy as a Night Owl

January 11, 2017

by Wendy Crosby, Loyola University Chicago

A lit interior window at night

I never thought I would become a night owl. I was never one to pull an all-nighter, and I refuse to let a sleep deficit build up. But, here I am, staying up past 4 a.m. and sleeping past noon every day of the week. I've seen the sunrise before heading to bed more times than I'd like to admit. This crazy schedule allows me to balance doctoral studies with the moments of married life I value most. The life of a PhD candidate can be hard, but almost no other job or position would allow me this kind of flexibility.

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Choices and Limits: Thinking about Work and Life

November 29, 2016

by Courtney Wilder, Midland University

black and white photo of several pocket watches

That there is an AAR conversation on work-life balance reminds me of a very funny and too-close-to home tweet from the Twitter account called Shit Academics Say (@AcademicsSay): “Yes, I've heard of work-life balance. I gave a workshop on it last week and am co-editing a related special issue to which I'm contributing.” More beautifully, the poet Adrienne Rich asks in Twenty One Love Poems: “What kind of beast would turn its life into words? What atonement is this all about?” We might consider what kind of worker turns her words into her life, and back again, so that the lines between speech and writing and work and life blur?

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Letting Go of Our Children: Taking My Son to College

October 10, 2016

by Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Earlham School of Religion

Working moms and stay-at-home moms have a tough life. Whether we work or stay at home as we raise our children, we will come to an inevitable point in our lives when we have to “let go” of our children and allow them to grow and become adults. Whether dropping them off at college or sending them off to the army or other major events, we must face the reality that they are leaving the “nest.” For some of us this will be a great time of joy, but for others, it will be a time of loss, adjustment, and big change.

For women who are professors, there is the added stress of how to manage your children while trying to maneuver through the academy. There is a growing amount of literature out there to help professorial moms navigate the academy so that they can be successful professors in their own respective areas.

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Work-Life Balance or Proportion: What’s In a Word?

September 28, 2016

by Maria Liu Wong, City Seminary of New York

Henri Matisse's "Tea in the Garden" (1919)

“Work-life balance” is a tenuous phrase. Is it possible to imagine that there can ever be real balance, or is it something we might think of instead as a “work-life proportion” in a particular season of time? A mother of three young children ages 2 years to 9 years, working full-time as an administrator and faculty in a seminary, and having spent the past three years of my life working on a dissertation on women and leadership in theological education, this notion of “work-life balance” has been on my mind A LOT. In a recent conversation with my pastor—a very busy man himself who spent a season of his life as primary caretaker for his sons while his wife was working the day shift—I was challenged me to think beyond the idea of “work-life balance,” but more in terms of proportions of time spent doing one thing versus the other.

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Knowing What You Need

September 14, 2016

by Mary E. Hunt, WATER

Privilege is a major factor in life/work balance. Sure, all of us can learn how to say no, put exercise first, eat healthily, get plenty of rest, and set up date nights. But race, class, sexual orientation/identity, age, ethnicity, etc., play pivotal roles in our options and whether we can exercise them.

I do not mean to imply that only privileged women can live balanced lives. Many do not. But colleagues who are loaded with debt, supporting parents as well as children, dealing with complex commuting arrangements, facing health challenges, and the like simply do not have the same luxury to decide whether they will start their day at the health club or end it with a massage. Achieving life-work balance becomes one more item on an already too long to-do list. For many colleagues survival is the goal.

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Aiming for the Good (Not the Perfect)

August 10, 2016

by Amy Elizabeth Jacober, PhD

Even as I write this, I am watching my children play in the backyard. I woke early had a cup of tea, finished one article to hit today’s deadline before making breakfast. Today was a banner day. There are plenty of days that I wake early with the best of intentions only to find a small child wanting—no, needing—to be held for the precious twenty minutes before we really hit the ground running. I have to make choices. My students, quite frankly, rarely care if they have to wait an extra day or two for feedback. There will always be one more comment to make, one more reference letter to write, and one more chapter to edit. I am a Type-A personality by nature, and in previous years I really could accomplish a ridiculous amount. That is still the picture of who I am in my head but reality is that there are just not enough hours in the day.

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Running into Myself

July 26, 2016

by Kimberly Carfore, California Institute of Integral Studies

Every morning is the same—my day begins with a trip to the coffeepot. On the way to the kitchen I pass a printout of my thirty-week marathon training schedule posted on the wall next to the refrigerator. With a fresh cup of coffee in hand, I glance to see what my body should prepare for later in the day—two miles, eight miles, 12 miles? I say “what my body should prepare for” and not “what I should prepare my body for.” This subtle distinction embodies the way I balance my work and life as a doctoral student.

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