Negotiating dance academia and parenting: a conversation between colleagues and friends

ABSTRACT This article aims to reveal the challenges of working mothers in dance academia in respect to balancing of teaching, service, administration, and research demands and parenting of young teens. Through a conversation, the authors aim to find solidarity in our similar situations in different geographic locations by exchanging ideas regrading practicalities and demands of dance academia in relationship to parentings. United by similar experiences, we aim to share our everyday accounts of working in dance academia, the physical challenges of ageing, efforts to stay relevant and question the evaluation and promotion process in order to create more empathic working conditions for parents in academia. Spurred by similar challenges of seeking work/family balance and specific demands of dance academia, the authors seek to analyze and discuss the issues surrounding motherhood and academia and advocate for more emphatic working conditions and promotion processes. This collaborative auto-ethnographic research aims to disturb the rigid structures of academia in relation to parenthood, professional development, and quality of life, which serves as a method to excavate cultural experience of parents, specifically mothers, working in dance academia and question dynamics of faculty evaluation, promotion, and professional progress.