Article begins
The pandemic has made working from home the new normal for many people. University academics are no exception. Scenes of work amid everyday life have become a familiar sight. In 2020, a tweet sent by environmental engineer Gretchen Goldman revealing the chaotic realities of juggling parenting and work, sparked much discussion.
The tweet was about her interview with CNN on September 15, 2020, which was conducted remotely from her home. Dressed in a suit jacket, Goldman, as she appeared on CNN, was the picture of professionalism. But outside the screen’s frame, the room was cluttered with the toys of her two children, aged two and four. From the picture, we can well imagine Goldman playing with her children right up until the interview and scrambling to throw on a jacket at the last moment.
Goldman’s tweet, titled “Just so I’m being honest,” quickly went viral, receiving more than 300,000 retweets and 2.8 million “likes” in a single day from readers for whom the scene was all too familiar.
As is evident from the term “work-life balance,” we have often treated work and life as separate and have sought a better balance between the two. The coronavirus pandemic, in an instant, tossed the two together into a blender. Feminist anthropologists may say, however, that the two have always been intermixed, challenging the dichotomy between private and public by moving beyond the formal spaces of waged work to recognize other more intimate sites, such as the household and the family, as spaces where work also takes place and hence as constitutive of global capitalism.
A Japanese Marxist feminist, Ueno Chizuko, in dialogue with a feminist comic writer Tabusa Eiko, has also discussed the gendered boundaries between public and private domains in the Japanese context. They use the word “A-side” and “B-side” to express the dichotomy between masculine and feminine domains:
I believe that society has an A-side and a B-side. Things like politics, the economy, time, and employment are part of society’s A-side. The B-side includes things like reproduction, care for the aged and children, illness, disability…. Men live on the A-side. Women also start out living on the A-side but are forced to go to the B-side when they have children. Men can also be forced to switch sides by illness or injury; but, as a general rule, they are able to stay on the A-side. Women have to move back and forth between the A-side and the B-side. For example, they may be told by a hospital on the B-side that they are “at risk of having a miscarriage and need to have a break from work,” setting up a struggle to make arrangements with their employer on the A-side. (Author’s translation of the original text in Japanese)
As can be seen from their apt descriptions, work on the A-side is generally signified as something that requires perfection, no ambiguity or vulnerability. From such a standpoint, life on the B-side might appear to be more fluid, where messiness, unpredictability, vulnerability, and, at times, contradiction, are par for the course. As Ueno and Tabusa and other feminists have observed, men hold privileges to keep the two domains relatively separate.
Goldman’s post brought into full view the reality of women juggling work and life, or A-side and B-side. That said, the pandemic has forced many people, not just women, to confront the blurred boundaries between these apparently distinct domains. It has shown that our lives—which include our homes, relationships, and emotions—exist at the same time and space as work. In this post-pandemic age, it is meaningful to rethink the separation between work and life that underlines the concept of work-life balance, and to imagine a new relationship between them.
Exploring this topic as an anthropologist in 2020 proved challenging as long-term, immersive investigations—traditional fieldwork—were difficult. I once again turned to feminist anthropology which at historical junctures has opened up hegemonic categories to “advocate for rebellious and liberatory alternatives.” The separation of work and life is a hegemonic categorization that needs to be questioned in a post-pandemic society. But it is not just conceptual categories that feminist anthropologists have addressed. They have also interrogated racial and gender biases in the methods of research and disseminations themselves. For instance, an inspiring body of work within “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography” has called for an examination of the impacts of personal lives in shaping anthropological fieldwork and the type of knowledge produced. Feminist anthropologists have also advocated for more collaborative and accessible ways to conduct research and disseminate findings by going beyond the use of texts to use other sensory modes, such as needlework, images, dance, and art.
Taking inspiration from this feminist anthropology, I designed an ethnographic experiment to understand life and work as intertwined processes in time and space. I focused on a segment of society that was familiar to me—researchers—to explore how their work was intermingled with the rest of their lives. Researchers included nonanthropologists, from sustainability scientists to engineers to economists. This reflected my own positionality in 2020 as an anthropologist working at an interdisciplinary institute. The experiment was also designed at a time when face-to-face long-term fieldwork was not possible. I was also on a short-term contract, which guaranteed no long-term relationships with the participants even if I desired one. Just as feminist anthropologists have theorized the intertwining of the personal and the professional, the need to generate an innovative methodology came out of the very domains of life characterized by health concerns, care for research participants and family members, and the temporality of contract insecurity.
In such a “life” context, collaborative Zoom dialogue became my field method. I asked researchers from the University of Tokyo, where I was based, to select three photographs that represented life for them. I invited them to share stories over these photographs, including those that were not explicitly shown in the images. In this experimental ethnography, instead of long-term participant observation in a community in which I supposedly immerse myself with an emic perspective, I invited interlocutors to reflect on their practices through a series of photographs they had chosen. My role as an anthropologist was to facilitate the dialogue; in many instances, my interlocutors led the discussion—the dialogue led to interpretation, which was shared with the interlocutors. This, in turn, led to another dialogue. I also invited a graphic recorder to record our dialogues in the form of graphic ethnography, a form that has gained increasing traction among public-facing anthropologists as it combines “the best of text (linear narrative) with the strength of images (quick, affective, and holistic interpretation)” to speak to diverse audiences in engaging and accessible ways. Many times, what graphic recorders decided to highlight in their visual work differed from what I highlighted in my writing. Such differences themselves provided new insights and allowed for more dialogue between the interlocutors, the graphic recorder, and the anthropologist. The written ethnographies and graphic recordings were published as open-access blog posts on the University of Tokyo’s website to encourage further dialogue with a public audience.
The ethnographic experiment brought to light unexpected, and even more so, unexpectedly productive, connections betwe