Paper short abstract:

Visual ethnography shows the “work at home”, which is usually hidden away in the privacy. How is to deal ethically with the fact, that the protagonists took social risks by letting us reach into their private home and by naming mechanisms of academic social injustice not even being anonymized?

Paper long abstract:

Academic life, as Max Weber has phrased it, is a “wild hazard”. Until the unlimited professorship-contract, one is in a biographically vulnerable situation and needs to compete with others for positions and funding and in that way, for social continuity within Academia. Making discriminating mechanism and gender-hierarchies visible is hardly possible. One is always risking social exclusion from the academic field to do so.

On the base of this insight, we use the ethnographic film and draw close to the years of Covid 19 – a time where the uncertainty and biographical vulnerability of academic lives became catalyzed, particularly those of academic parents. We zoom in on the everyday life of five protagonists and their ways of negotiating care work and professional advancement with uncertainties. Visual ethnography with its cultural-anthropological approach serves as an empirical-analytical tool in its own right, as it will literally let us see the challenges of “work at home”, which are usually hidden away in the privacy. How did and do we ethically deal with the fact, that the protagonists took social risks by letting us reach into their private home and by naming severe mechanisms of academic social injustice not even being anonymized?

Indeed, parents’ uncertainties differ from those of other social groups. Still, we need to focus on the socio-political and existential dynamics in our very own field. As we contend, the ethnographic film, as a still peripheral form of analysis, functions as a strong discursive marker of imaginatively broadening our academic practice.