 I'm Josephine Biokubets, Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, formerly at Floyd Atlantic University. Our book, Global Feminist Technographies during COVID-19, Displacements, Disruptions, is co-edited by Melanie Heath, Akoswa Dakwa, Josephine Biokubets and Vandana Pokaisa. This book is our witness to living history as we sociologists in the academy or sociologists associated with the academy struggled to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. I had just assumed my term as president of Sociologists for Women in Society when COVID-19 happened and I was confronted with how the organization could assist our members at that time who in various ways were being impacted by the pandemic. For example, loss of jobs, online teaching, adjusting to that, working from home, caring for the family, disruption of field work for graduate students, researching as well as faculty at home and abroad. So in association with the executive officer of SWS, Barrett Katuna, we put together some town hall meetings to find out about the concerns and needs of our members. And one of these town hall meetings included looking at the issue from a global perspective and what the concerns of our networks, our associate organizations, sister organizations and our global partners within SWS, how they were coping. And it was a very lively discussion and we decided as a result of that to document our experiences and challenges and ways of coping by collaborating globally in the form of a call for papers for a proposed book. And so this is how the book started and there were various questions that came up that we wanted to look at. For example, what has changed or intensified during the pandemic? In what ways were we hurting? How do our analysis challenges, the struggles, the trauma we all experience helped us understand intersecting inequalities that are being enhanced today. We also asked questions about what new challenges were being contended during COVID by people of color, heterosexual and non-heterosexual women and men, gender, non-binary individuals, all within the academic world. So this book is a global reflection of life through academia during the pandemic. And we organized it thematically into three sections, disruptions, displacements and distress. And the contributing authors represented various countries and regions of the world. Some of the countries included Ghana, South Africa, India, Canada, Finland, United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. And also within that, within the United States, for example, represented various regions. But also some of the contributing authors represented the diaspora in various ways. For example, Nepal, Iran, Taiwan, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic and so on. And so this is how we try to develop a global perspective and looking at this issue at that time in real time. Thank you. Okay, I will take it from there. I'm Melanie Heath and I'm an associate professor of sociology at McMaster University in Canada. And so I am also one of the co-editors of global feminist auto ethnographies. And Josie had introduced the three sections of our books. And this was really the three themes that came out of the various stories we gathered from academics across the globe. So displacements, disruptions and distress really characterized for us how feminists on a global level are coping during the pandemic. And our book ties together these different accounts to explore how structures of empower intensified and reached, I would say, really deeply into our lives. By sort of having greater control of the time spaces in which we're positioned. So by focusing on academia to record these kinds of disruptions and displacements, we were able to showcase the major structural changes underway in higher education. So even those systems of education, including of course, higher education, are supposed to play a key role in the production of education as a public good. These institutions are rapidly shifting towards producing a commodity for profit, which is knowledge in education. To enhance profit, there are growing number of professors in temporary positions, graduate students on fellowships that do not provide living wages, and the less vulnerable workers who provide support services, such as cleaning of buildings, but who are rarely acknowledged as the academic labor force. So the idea of displacement really comes from scholars who study migration to indicate one level of disruption that has affected our lives. This term emphasizes really both the geographic space, time disturbance of patterns of people's everyday lives, but it also looks at the severe disruptions of social networks, especially where they exist and ultimately the nature of those kinds of ties. So if sets of tasks were carried out at home or in public spaces at certain times of each day prior to the pandemic, these routines were variously disrupted as people were displaced to spaces where boundaries between home and work shrank. The lives of refugees or internally displaced people who are forced into camps constitutes a strong, stark and harrowing example of this kind of displacement. Typically forces outside their control compel people to move. At the individual level, refugees experience severe stress, one could say even trauma, related to leaving familiar faces in people. And these displacements force people to learn new ways of life amidst uncertainty about political, social, economic conditions in new places and in new situations. And each day new ways of living must be relearned and established. And this kind of new normality can really lead to distress overall. So while the conditions of refugees are significantly more distressing than many of our own, nonetheless we use this idea of displacement for reflections as a way to think about how the pandemic can no longer rely on established, during the pandemic, we can no longer rely on daily practices within the institutional structures that we have become familiar. And we use the term distress to indicate the suffering people have experienced during the pandemic, but the term itself encapsulates a continuum from distress to trauma really. In our book we gathered accounts of extreme distress as parents and loved ones passed away as people struggled with their own loved ones health problems, not related in fact to COVID, and during times where resources have been diverted to address COVID as jobs and ability to work as before are made precarious. Added to this is the high stress experience by those who have been imprisoned by, I say imprisoned by immigration and travel restrictions, experiencing the toll of solitary lives or severe disruptions to hopes of joining families, and we're seeing this of course right now in China. We emphasize that intersecting structures have positioned some people in ways that they endure longer periods of suffering, including violence directed at their communities. So each essay in our book highlights different aspects of coping amongst these disruptions. The reality of the pandemic repeated confinement and strict restrictions on travel have meant that new institutional policies of nursing homes of hospitals and other such care providing places which supplemented our family responsibilities have simply added more layers of rules to our family lives. How we are doing family every day by providing support for everyday care, how we are trying to increase their support when family members in the households or far away are becoming ill have become ill, and how we cope with loss and grief as loved ones passed away. This is all involved navigating new social terrain shaped by these multiple institutional new rules. Adding to the escalating job precarious and inequalities which have enhanced our distress, we found that we're coping with loss of our face to face nurturing relationships was key. Not all emotions can be affirmed through words via phones or computers. And with our loss of embodied support, we lost many social rituals that brought us solace. The loss of ability to travel thus meant dealing with loved ones illness and grief from far away. So the auto ethnographies in our book offer a record of these displacements disruptions and distress to help us grapple with these kinds of critical questions and inequality about inequality that are being heightened by the pandemic. And I would say for answers, we'll have to take heed of the new social order that is unfolding now. Thank you. Thank you. And I am Bandinapur K. Astha and I'm a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut in the U.S. Josephine Buchbets talked about one of the inception of this book and Melanie Heath talked about the overall, you know, what did we find from various accounts. I want to draw your attention to a somewhat different and difficult issue that we encountered and we hope you all are grappling with as you try to do your work in, you know, this decade of the 21st century. And that is about decolonizing. In academia, decoloniality, decolonizing efforts, all of these have become words that we encounter every single day. But as we were doing this book with the best intentions in the world and all of us are absolutely committed to it, whether we are in the global north or we are in the global south, we encountered in real terms the gaps between our intentions, our practices and where we end up with the whole process. So I want to share a couple of ideas along those lines. One thought is that when we talk about decoloniality now, our emphasis has been on, you know, be inclusive in your citations, use theories from the global south, use theories from scholars who have not been, you know, represented in a big way. But the other part of the challenge is the methodological one. But when you make some decisions about, you know, how some work will be done, to what extent is it still embedded in those global north frameworks and what can you do about it? So we initially sent out the scroll using all of our networks on, you know, that we wanted to do a global auto ethnography. And very quickly, it became apparent to us that, you know, people began asking us, like, what exactly did you mean by that? And our first intention was, oh, we'll send you some writings, but the writings were all from the US. And so very quickly, we got to a position that if we really want to confront our own power, we needed to refrain from sending these examples of auto ethnography and let people tell their experiences in their own way, whether that ultimately became storytelling or autobiographies or auto ethnographies did not matter. The objective was to document, you know, particular a particular period of time of great social change with heightened racial biopolitics, you know, emerging at the global level and within countries. And so people ought to be able to write the way they wanted to. The second aspect of this was we had to let people write in their own style. If again, the global north has a style template. And the issue was to get away from that template. So to let people decide on the order of their writing, the emphasis that they felt was important, and never mind what we were looking for. And also importantly, what they felt should not be written for a whole variety of reasons within the local context. So because it was a very cooperative and fulfilling process for us at least, we were able to, as we moved along, keep on saying that just, you know, write it the way you do. And of course, for the global north scholars, we had to keep challenging them. You're using all of these words, explain yourself. None of this may make sense to somebody in another country. There's no taken for grantedness about what you're saying, write it in a way that it is understandable. That said, we encountered a lot of other challenges as well. Reviewers, particularly based in the global north, having seen the term auto ethnography, wanted a different product. So we had to embark on some fights in that direction. So there were a lot of other issues that went into something that we thought was primarily a methodological and theoretical issue. In the end, as we write in the book, we fought some of the fights, we tried to, you know, really stay open. And I think collectively, all of the authors stayed open to the rest of the authors and the rest of the audiences. But we still feel there are months to go. And it's a process that will take a lot more effort and a lot of cooperation and collaboration as we keep moving forward, both writing together, as well as being supportive of each other. So I'm going to end there. Thank you. Hi, everyone. My name is Rituparna and I teach Sociology and Interpress College for Women University of Delhi. So the chapter that we co-wrote was written by Metri Chaudhry, myself, Dipali and Dinesh. So four of us were located in JNU, a university in March in the news, recently for all the wrong reasons. But it has also had its own highlights and moments of prominence over the years. Now, when we saw the call for the book that came out, our immediate thought was to put into writing what we were experiencing as very unique experiences and moments of disruptions and distress, particularly with the pandemic and even before that. So our chapter refers to some of the ways in which because of political reasons, the university has been in turmoil for the past few years. And education as a public good, which Melanie was talking about was actually being challenged at the highest level. So there were movements that students led against a proposed fee height in hostels and in the mess, as well as challenges to thought how research is being done, as well as teaching being conducted. So there were these several issues that all of us were confronting. Metri Chaudhry as a professor and the three of us as students, research scholars to be specific at different levels. I was on the verge of submission before the pandemic. And once the pandemic came, my submission was completely thrown out of the window. And actually, a university at the national Indian level did not have the mechanism to facilitate students and their submission for several months, even within the pandemic. And as everything was continuing, it also meant that there was no institutional zoom or Google Meet account to hold classes on. So many students and teachers actually made do with their free account of zoom, which would be for 40 minutes and then get cut off, as well as in Google Meet, where you did not have the advanced features. So education as a public good had reached its limitations. There was no library access. The nation particularly comes from a marginalized background face several issues in terms of his scholarship money, this buzzer, as well as mere survival. We two faced issues in our scholarship and were asked to vacate the hostel without the university making any alternate arrangements. So in that sense, our ethnographies were very similar, yet dissimilar, owing to the social locations that we came in, but because of our presence in chain new. So this chapter is about our experiences, our theorization of the lived experiences during the pandemic. And we rely on auto ethnography as a primary method that helped us sort of collate the experiences of four people. And the next speaker, Diwali will speak more about the importance of the method and why it helped us. Thank you. Thank you, Ritu Panna. My name is Diwali and I'm currently teaching sociology at the Department of Sociology in Ranchi University, India. To take forward what Ritu Panna has just mentioned about our chapter in the book, I begin by a line from the chapter, the introduction to our chapter, which says that while post colonialism is respectable in global academia, the subaltern, subalternity of non Western experiences remain largely invisible. And I think this line is very key to what we are trying to do in this chapter. And this book gave us the platform to sort of put forth our argument as those located in the global south and share our experiences using auto ethnography as a method as a methodology, which would sort of decolonize how knowledge is produced. In fact, auto ethnography has for long been argued to be a method which allows people to challenge the colonial ways of knowledge production. So in our chapter, we've tried to take into account our own experiences. And as Ritu Panna was mentioning, the four of us who co wrote the chapter are writing our own experiences, we are reflecting on what we felt, what we thought, what we went through as four people associated with the public university, and yet with very different backgrounds. So this whole process of writing the chapter using the auto ethnography method was key in not only making data available, but also in challenging what is talked about the global south or the you know, a university in a global south during the pandemic. In fact, what was extremely interesting for us was, as previously Professor Porcaesta was mentioning, that we as authors or co authors had the freedom to choose what we said about ourselves or what we wrote about our experiences in the pandemic and how we spoke about it. In fact, even the language that we chose was of our own, we were able to choose what or how we communicated in the chapter what we wanted to. So in this whole process of writing this chapter for the four of us, the self became the site of research. And that again helped us reflect on what was happening around us and where we were placed as those or scholars in the global south. And what were the challenges that we were facing the challenges not only of an ongoing pandemic, but also as people who are located under a very specific regime. So our whole idea the idea behind the chapter was to put forth an argument from the global south about how we have experienced the pandemic and at the same time try to challenge the traditional ways in which knowledge is produced, especially about the global south. And I think in our small attempt while writing this chapter using auto ethnography of auto ethnography methodology we've been I'd say have made this small effort to do the same. And I'd say that often when we've as early research, early career researchers say Ritu Panami or Dinesh or as Professor Chaudhry who's a senior scholar in the global south are challenged more or as scholars writing from the global south is often to fit in our I'd say stories into the narratives or the ways in which knowledge is already created. But this in this chapter we were able to do it how we were comfortable talking about it. So think this is what I would like to say about our experience of writing this chapter using auto ethnography method. Thank you. Thank you everybody and I'm going to try and just draw some strands of what you said into some concluding comments. And the comments are as and particularly as Dipali and Ritu Panami pointed out and we also experienced and understood we all faced you know disruptions dislocations and distress. But reading everybody's chapters together wasn't real lesson for us and it was a real lesson to see how differently the dislocations and disruptions and distress played out depending on local and global circumstances. That was an important lesson for us but equally important was was important is the rapid rate at which academia changed supposedly for pandemic purposes to handle the pandemic we needed to do this and this and this and this and we happen to now be in a perfect moment where the pandemic even though it survives seems to have gone away from many official discussions yet those pandemic induced changes have not gone away. So the question moving forward is where are we now and where are we going to be because the pandemic also opened the doors for very deep incursions of states and other entities into our most private lives and our most private lives frequently across nation state boundaries just as much as it has within countries. So those are the strands the book is a record and we hope it is a meaningful record both for the people who are right who have written and the people who are going to read it. The book is also a kind of warning about the future that if the pandemic related conditions actually survive we are in the middle of a change which is similar to the enormous changes that took place when industrialization became normalized in societies a lot of changes a lot of disruptions and most importantly a lot of uncertainties of about who we are as humans and what will our futures look like. Thank you.