Gone Funding Hunting Lately? Parenting, Pandemic, and Research-Related Travel
by Patricia Akhimie
Editor’s Note: The companion piece on teaching in the pandemic is available here.
“A researcher requests support for caregiving while researching or writing.” I had to read this line more than once to believe it was real. It was listed, quite casually, along with other more familiar research-related expenses for the Folger Shakespeare Library fellowship — things like travel and time off from teaching — hidden amongst them as if to suggest that it wasn’t an earth-shatteringly unusual sight, like a little green Martian in a shiny, silver saucer.
Perhaps it’s been a while since you’ve gone hunting for funding, perhaps because you’ve all but given up on the possibility that parenting can coincide with extended research projects, especially those that require residency, long-distance commuting, or extensive travel. With this I can surely relate. I did finally take up a long-term residency at a research library a couple of years ago and it was a breeze, let me tell you. All I had to do was sell my apartment, rent another apartment sight unseen in my destination city, pack up everything I owned, drive five hours, and then unpack everything I owned.
I also had to ask my co-parent to uproot and move his own career and life, place my three-year-old on waiting lists and in lotteries for a dozen different preschools, settle her in a new school and in a new bed in a new apartment, and rapidly rebuild an entire network of pediatricians, playmates, babysitters, and, last but not least, an OBGYN, since I was also newly pregnant with a second child.
EASY AS PIE.
Actually, the pay-off made it all (just about) worth it: nine months at a research library with access to every archival resource I could ever want or need. But though I waddled through the stacks right up until my due date, thrilled at the opportunity to do so, the strain on my family both financially and otherwise was certainly very real.
And, of course, it isn’t just library residencies that produce this strain on faculty parents and faculty families. It’s conferences that require week-long hotel stays, elaborate and often inadequate childcare arrangements, and (for me anyway) red-eye flights to make it back in time for breakfast, hugs, and drop-off on Monday morning. It’s short-term fellowships and visiting research or teaching positions that require residency. It’s faculty seminars and symposia that meet once a week in some sadly inconvenient location and offer no accommodation for those commuting long distances (even though school lets out — without fail — at 3:15 p.m.). It’s easy enough to say, “there will be time for all that when the kids are older,” but in fact for most faculty parents, our years of intensive parenting are also some of the most productive and active years of our scholarly careers.
I want to suggest something that I’ve been thinking a lot about as I’ve been juggling work with childcare over these past really difficult months. What if conferences took place remotely or semi-remotely, with the bulk of sessions on weekdays and during business hours, when parents are most likely to be free to attend events? What if those fabulous faculty seminars that meet once a week offered the opportunity for a remote gathering if not every year then perhaps every other or every third year? If nothing else, our 2020 experience has shown us that this is certainly doable and perhaps even preferable (and cheaper) in some ways. If I’d known how many such opportunities would end up “going remote” in 2020, I would surely have applied! What is lost when residency or in-person participation is a requirement for workshops, seminars, and conferences (and fellowships, visiting jobs, and so on)? What is to be gained by sacrificing the supposed “intimacy” of in-person conversations for not all, but some such opportunities? What could be more intimate than meeting in our respective living rooms!
These past months have demonstrated how much scholarly conversation can continue and be productive without traveling or moving temporarily to a new location. As we rounded the bend on 2020, I engaged in some new year reflection on the biggest changes in my professional life as a faculty parent. Perhaps one of the strangest is that I have been to more speaking events, conferences, and symposia in the last few months than I have been able to attend in the last few years. This is all because, without the hassle of having to leave my partner to parent alone for several days or (gods-forbid) travel with a toddler to Des Moines or wherever, I can show up. And when I can’t be there for the live session, I can often watch it recorded later. I can be there and not be square — amazing! In a profession in which being there and being up to speed on the latest research is essential, this change is a game changer indeed.
Even after this pandemic is behind us and the toilet paper aisle is full of toilet paper again, we can choose to keep some of the changes that this reboot has brought about. Given the chance, I would gratefully transform my conference travel schedule to an 80% online and 20% in-person attendance ratio, instead of 10% in-person and 90% hear about it from a friend or forget about it all together ratio. I am happy to report that some fellowships have already begun to change policies and offer more flexible schedules, remote options, and to include caregiving costs among the list of expenses recognized as research-related (such as the Folger Shakespeare Library fellowship quoted above, and ACMRS’s flexible Short Term Residencies).
Approaches like these can and should be here to stay. They’re long overdue for our field and for higher education in general, which has historically offered limited opportunities for scholars who, for various reasons, can’t travel to all the conferences where cutting-edge research is presented, the archives where scholarly breakthroughs happen, and the seminars where intellectual communities are forged. These sites of discovery and exchange are essential to our work, and if we really want a more inclusive academia, we need to ensure that they are accessible to all.
Parenting-Related Resources: Scholarly Conferences
Some scholarly organizations, societies, and institutions offer financial or logistical support for childcare and eldercare during conferences. If yours do not, you might point them toward these examples.
- ACNP (American College of Neuropsychopharmacology) offers travel awards that include up to $80/day for childcare costs.
- AHA (American Historical Association) offers childcare grants of up to $250.
- ASCB (American Society for Cell Biology) offers travel and childcare grants.
- MLA (Modern Language Association) offers childcare funding of up to $400.
- Northwestern has a travel grant for dependent and elder care of up to $1000 per year.
- University of California Irvine offers Dependent Care Travel Awards for faculty with children 6 years and younger
- University of California San Diego offers a travel grant of up to $2500 per year.
Further Reading
- Bos, Angela L., Jennie Sweet-Cushman, and Monica Schneider. “Family-Friendly Conferences.” InsideHigherEd (Feb 7, 2018).
- Calisi, Rebecca. “The Special Challenges of Being Both a Scientist and a Mom.” Scientific American (Mar 30, 2018).
- Calisi, Rebecca and a Working Group of Mothers in Science. “How to Tackle the Childcare–Conference Conundrum.” PNAS (Mar 20, 2018).
- Early, Jessica, and Trisalyn Nelson. “3 Ways to Survive Academe with Kids.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Nov 21, 2019).
- Swann, Nicole. “Scientist and Parent: Are We There Yet?” eLife (Jun 14, 2019).
- Tower, Leslie E. “Caregiving and Conferencing: Supporting Faculty’s Participation in Conference Travel.” The ADVANCE Journal (Jan 26, 2021).
Patricia Akhimie is “in residence” this year as a 2020–2021 Chancellor’s Scholar with Rutgers University Newark’s professional development center, the P3 Collaboratory, working to build resources for faculty parents and writing the blog series “The Faculty Parent” which chronicles the highs and lows of juggling parenting, research and writing, in uncertain times. She is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and early modern women’s travel writing. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (Routledge 2018). She is co-editor, with Bernadette Andrea of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press 2019). She is also the mother of two kids, ages five and one.
