Telling Our Story: Making Sense of the Pandemic

Telling Our Story:Making Sense of the Pandemic Anurekha Chari Wagh (bio) Melanie Heath, Akosua K. Darkwah, Josephine Beoku-Betts, and Bandana Purkayastha (eds.)'s Global Feminist Autoethnographies during COVID-19: Displacements and Disruptions, London: Routledge, 2022 Nanjala Nyabola's Strange and Difficult Times: Notes on Global Pandemic, London: Hurst, 2022 Both the books under review here (Global Feminist Autoethnographies during COVID-19 and Strange and Difficult Times) are important contributions to the study of the pandemic and its impact on our diverse and intersecting worlds. These two books engage, in multiple intersecting yet distinct ways, the concern raised by Boisseau and Ernstberger in their call for papers for this special issue of Women's Studies Quarterly on "Pandemonium." They state that this issue "creates space for feminist studies practitioners to consider the tumultuous circumstances we find ourselves in, to document and reflect on recent experiences, and to draw conclusions about the current state—and possible future—of our field." This appeal is reflected in the writing of Nyabola (2022, xi–xii), who states in the foreword to Strange and Difficult Times, "a book about pandemic should not just be about the crises, it should illuminate what the crises meant and what the crises could mean … a dirge for everything we lost and a sonnet for everything good we learnt about ourselves." Or, as Purkayastha and colleagures, while introducing Global Feminist Autoethnographies, write, "in this collection of essays written by people in or connected to academia, we reflect on our personal experiences through ethnographies on ourselves to unpack and understand changing social conditions during this pandemic" (1). This review is divided into three sections. The first section will highlight the issues raised by the book Global Feminist Autoethnographies during COVID-19. The second section examines the issues, arguments and experiences shared in the book Strange and Difficult Times. The third section builds on the threads that bind the two books together through their stories of making sense of the pandemic and the worlds they live, breathe, and create their lives in. End Page 321 Looking Back on a Tumultuous Time The book Global Feminist Autoethnographies covers various issues experienced by diverse scholars in different global academic locations during COVID-19. In the introduction, Purkayastha and colleagues state "that the book of autoethnographies is a record, an act of bearing witness to experiences during this pandemic in the second decade of the twenty-first century" (1). Interestingly, the editors link the experiences of dealing with the pandemic through the "node—academia—to record the disruptions, displacements and distresses." The book is divided into three parts addressing each of these issues in the context of pandemic and academia using the collaborative autoethnographic method. The first part, titled "Disruptions: Seismic Work and Life Shifts," contains seven papers and a short introduction by Akosua K. Darkwah, highlighting how the pandemic disrupted the world of productive and reproductive work and shifted the notion of academic space. In particular, the papers raise the issue of how the pandemic impacted minority, low-income, and first-generation learners, pushing them into more precarious situations. The experience of tenured and nontenured academics, particularly in the context of disproportionate care responsibilities, is also addressed. Papers also examine how academic educational institutions could not address the needs of diverse student populations. The impact of the pandemic in the context of the eroding of public institutions, amplifying the already marginalized lives of the vulnerable groups within the academic space, is examined. This section also addresses the uncertainties of the university lives of faculty members in relation to teaching methods, particularly the technological challenge of teaching using online methods, the reduction in research grants, and the decrease of administrative support, which shifted the way one engaged with teaching and research. This section, while highlighting feminist principles of care work, emphasizes the negotiations with paid and care work in the same spatial settings, engaging with disruptions in lives by their situated precarities. As Darkwah states, the papers use "intersectional perspectives in understanding the differential costs of the pandemic as well as the differences in the ability of faculty to successfully navigate the disruptions caused by the pandemic" (2022, 22). Part 2, titled "Distress: Personal...