Qualitative Female Researchers in Academia: Challenges and Contradictions

Introduction

We are two academics, one of us lives and works in Seville, Spain and the other in Arica, a city in the north of Chile. We have had the opportunity to carry out research stays in different universities in Spain, the United States, and other countries, and it is precisely from these abstractions of our daily realities that we came to discover books on contemporary qualitative inquiry and autoethnography, which at one point were futuristic for us if we think of the moments of qualitative inquiry that remain in our countries, and that allowed us to gain an understanding of cultural experience in a diverse macro context (e.g., Ellis et al., 2010) that considers creative, literary, and political elements (e.g., Denzin & Lincoln, 2017). We spontaneously came together to dialogue in a reflective intersubjective exchange that led us to the confrontation of our ways of being and exercising our work as academic women, of roles and ways of relating to life, our cultures, and academic trajectories according to our gender in our universities. In this sense, Mauthner & Doucet (2003) and Watt (2007) use the concept of critical self-evaluation in qualitative inquiry that includes, besides the concepts of race, gender, age and education, the importance of philosophical beliefs and assumptions accumulated throughout our lives that unconsciously inhabit our minds, as information that defines our research questions, forms, and topics. For us, these elements add up to a set of elements but unlike the authors, we emphasize gender as a methodological tool to explore autoethnographically so as to understand what we do, why we do it, and why others are the way they are in relation to gender relations also in the academy.

After attending and coinciding in the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) since 2009, which we understand as a space—protected of thought—that promotes the connection between one another and the learnings between generations, disciplines, themes, methodologies, and moments “in a globalized world in trouble”, theme of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2018. We started to realize how different and difficult it was to perform qualitative inquiry in our countries, because of how difficult it was to get permissions for our voices to be validated by going on disparate paths in relation to the development of knowledge based on positivist paradigms in our academics, thus emerging the first contradiction, developing critical thinking, requires a decision that requires having coherence with life in general, including the different gender roles the role of women in academia (e.g., Goldsmith & Bauer, 2021).

Spontaneously, Magda and I began to generate a space for conversation of our readings, while we took breaks at lunchtime or mid-morning coffee in one of the cafeterias equipped for UIUC students, but flooded by the calm and spring weather at times when students were on vacation, where we found the right environment for our daily reflections to generate a diverse, irregular, symmetrical, and resistant fabric of colors, in which we contrasted our ways of thinking with feminist theories, and the validation of our voices now making gender visible as a mediator of these experiences and knowledge. In our conversations, there has always been warmth, friendship, active listening, understanding, respect, and sisterhood, all that we valued as special to the everyday, and that made us see that the normal did not always contain these attributes.

These “sessions” allowed us to visualize new spaces of thought that we had to locate in the near future when we returned to our countries, but at the same time, it generated concerns and contradictions that arose between what we studied—and made so much sense to us—and what was normal in our lives. Everything that, despite our cultural differences, was similar in terms of our work and experiences lived according to the cultural patterns transmitted generationally in the case of the role of women academics in Spanish-speaking universities. We read, for example, Denzin’s interpretive autoethnography method (Denzin, 2014), and we saw the life that a text written in first person could acquire, through voices that critically describe the political and social context in which the lives of qualitative researchers developed, and the importance of personal experience, as a weapon that evoked and connects with our lives. All that burst in contrast to our formation in our universities of origin, which persevered in omitting our color, gender, voices, and politics, valuing these omissions and paradigmatic positionings as synonymous with formality, scientific rigor, and academic values that understand knowledge as objectifiable, distant, capturable, and static. At the same time, we were challenged, not knowing how to find coherence between these reflections and our normality in our countries and in the different roles of women in the academic and personal, family, and social spheres of our lives. Particularly, in qualitative research on problems that occur to other women but that also concern us from the moment we define our research and become participants in their stories.

If we think of what to call this small text we think of: Women in academia: a challenge to the everyday; A transgression to the field, the discipline, the job; or How to be women in academia and not feel wrong.

These reflections also respond to the question of what is the limit between what we do (with all the love, dedication, responsibility, and commitment), and that paradoxically the more we address sensitive issues, we find ourselves sometimes leaving our own life in the background, which in the worst cases has led us to disconnection and even dehumanization of life itself when we get sick and do not realize it, because we do not feel anything and because our attention is focused on the urgent demands we receive every day in these times in which we spend long days sitting in front of the computer. So, we ask ourselves, what are our personal, social, and research challenges, recognizing our trajectories and learning that we point out here.

For Magda and me, although our conversations have strengthened a bond of friendship that originally arose in A Day in Spanish and Portuguese community [ADISP] and the general congress, our voices come from different referents and cultures, being the striking thing that despite this, we maintain the same visions and feelings as academic women. In these exchanges, we have had access to a window open to the world, to a possibility of rethinking ourselves and the context that surrounds us, to clarify our values from a physical distance and personal closeness, in relation to other like-minded people, who have been defining our route and positions in the academy, at a time of personal and professional transition that has to do with our ages, and life (between 40 and 50), and that after facing many challenges, manages to reach more defined and stable professional moments that give us enough security for academic development considering the uncertainty that today characterizes the current context of public higher education in these pandemic times. In this sense, our reflections lead us to the space created intersubjectively from a particular context, Urbana-Champaign, but which we can now access from different places, where we have been able to experience happiness and feel comfortable doing, defining the next academic and life steps, in a space of freedom in connection so conducive to grow and develop our ideas, voices, and work for the coming years. All this away from oppressions and a hierarchical and hegemonic social order that limits us to disparate positions, which forced us to work double to be validated, and to resist limiting our development understood as a right in the educational field. In this sense, putting color, origin, gender, evolutionary stage, and context to our voices leads us to see the effort made to get here, recognizing the implications of being women in the academy, and to break the glass of norms, roles, social order, and everything that is attributed to us for gender reasons, so that from the act of making these elements conscious, we can think and continue learning and apprehending reality through the development of our research projects. Likewise, this window has forced us to seek the desired coherence in the different areas of our lives, including our role as student educators and research with women in terms of their study and work trajectories, and in culturally diverse childhood, with unrecognized voices of children, adolescents and public-school teachers in a context of sovereignty and centralized nationalist education with little cultural relevance for the region under study (Mondaca-Rojas et al., 2020). In this sense, the open window that we have found has shown us a path that placed us in another place in our research, defining who we are in relation to our research, which drives an important part of our motivations and contributions to the academy, also recognizing our own gender biases when conducting research and the invisibilities that we reproduced, for example, by not focusing on processes and reflections such as those presented here, because they were not considered relevant according to us, keeping the results as the only contribution of the studies we conducted. Thus, and agreeing with Jayne Pitard (2017), this window allowed us to feel free to explore our own reflections and to give credit to them in terms of the emphasis we give to the topics that, like this one, we found necessary to highlight today.