Navigating the Academic Job Market at the Expense of Processing Birth Trauma: Reclamation for Healing

• In Event: What Is the Black Maternal Health Crisis and What Is It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
This paper explores the process of healing when birth trauma and the academic job market collide. Through my story as a Black and Chicana motherscholar, I explain how I neglected the process of healing from birth trauma to navigate the job market, by interviewing and delivering a job talk within weeks of a traumatic birth and while caring for a child in the NICU. Often the “potential and resources for transformation” are invisible “because of historical, cultural, and social conditions” (Montero & Sonn, 2009, p. 1). Though time was not a resource I understood as available to me, this work explicates how I reclaimed time and my physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being to move toward healing. For women of color, engaging in resistance is central to combatting trauma and advancing wellness (Bryant-Davis & Comas-Díaz, 2016). Healing can come in the reclamation.

Perspective/Theoretical Framework
This work draws from womanist and mujerista psychologies that emphasize “self definition and the art of healing of Black women and Latinas as they strive to survive, grow, and thrive in the face of multiple, intersecting forms of oppression” (Bryant-Davis & Comas-Díaz, 2016). Central to this process is interrogating inequity, the struggle to counter it, and restoration (Bryant-Davis & Comas-Díaz, 2016). Liberation then develops from the process of “transforming both the conditions of inequality and oppression and the institutions and practices producing them” (Montero & Soon, 2009, p. 1). This liberatory and restorative process is “holistic” in that it is not limited to cognition, but inclusive of “the mind, body, spirit, relationship, creativity, and political empowerment” (Bryant-Davis et al., 2021).

Methods/Modes of Inquiry/Data Sources
The mode of inquiry for this work is an autoethnography, a methodological process that combines narrative details with cultural analysis (Chang, 2008). It explores the connection between individual life and historical, social, and cultural contexts (Chávez, 2012), to develop a multilayered conscious understanding of an experience (Ellis, 2004). This autoethnographic work was developed from four sources: (1) textual sources including medical records, emails, and social media; (2) existing literature on time and healing; (3) personal memory data, a chronicle record of the events; and (4) self-reflective data, present perspectives. An autoethnographic juxtaposition of the personal, birth trauma, and social, the academic job market, provides a more critical understanding of how oppression and inequity function in academy.
Arguments/Conclusions/Significance
Within current hierarchical structures, time to engage in healing is a privilege permissible to those who have the financial well-being or status to procure a job at a later date. Yet, through a womanist and mujerista psychology framework time is an invisible resource that we can reclaim, even if at a later date, to rest (Hersey, 2022), resist, and rise (Bryant-Davis et al., 2016). This paper is significant because it calls academia to reconsider its role in perpetuating the sacrifice of well-being and encourages women of color to reclaim time and health to heal from trauma.

Author

• Qiana Lachaud, Georgia State University