Building community through feminist collectivity: being and becoming women in academia

ABSTRACT This paper explores women’s experiences in academia through collective biography from a feminist, transdisciplinary, intersectional frame. Crosscutting disciplines, classifications, and subject positions, we use dialogue to explore the nuances of what it is to be a woman in academia, and the experiences of building and developing community as women. We draw on data from a fall 2020 focus group where we each were part of a course in designing qualitative inquiry, as well as our reflections, memos, and conversations in dialogues that followed. These dialogues are accentuated with footnotes that function as a concurrent playlist of research, art, and music reflecting women’s lives and experiences. We use poetic transcription and audio poetry to offer the texture of our experiences, offering both methodological and empirical implications for studying and researching women’s experiences in academia.