“Work-life Balance of Vietnamese Female Faculty"

Huyen Nguyen, Ph.D. Candidate | Educational Administration & Human Resource Development

Abstract:

Faculty members are working in high-pressure environments with high workloads, multifaceted demands, high expectations, and stressors. This work overload and stressful environment results in faculty members working long hours in order to complete their tasks. Female faculty, while working for the same hours as their male counterparts, bear more responsibilities at home due to social expectations ascribed to them including taking care of children, parents and parents-in-law, siblings, and doing domestic chores, which take a large portion of their time. As a result, women professors experience anxiety, exhaustion, and guilt of not perfectly completing various tasks of their lives. This study aims at exploring the lived experiences of Vietnamese female faculty members with regard to their work-life balance. By adopting a phenomenological approach, 15 Vietnamese female faculty members were interviewed on their experiences with work-life balance. Preliminary findings will be used to make recommendations to university leaders and policy makers so that favorable policies and programs can be offered to faculty in general and female faculty in particular to help them balance their work and life.

 

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"'Knowing was like dying’: Painful Epiphanies and the Trauma of Microaggressions in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones"

Zachary Riggins, Ph.D. Candidate | English

Abstract:

The pandemic and the racial justice movements of the past few years have brought renewed attention to the ways in which daily experiences of stress and oppression could potentially be cumulatively traumatic. Despite this, the prevailing theory of how trauma operates and how trauma can be represented in literature fails to attend to the ways that trauma can result from repeated experiences of seemingly minor forms of oppression—what Riggins terms ‘quotidian trauma’. Riggins’s paper seeks to articulate a weak theory of the quotidian trauma that results from microaggressions. The pain of quotidian trauma, he suggests, can be successfully conveyed through the literary device of the epiphany of Du Boisian double consciousness. Through a close reading of Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Riggins demonstrates how writers can use quotidian trauma narratives to show readers how to understand their own experiences of ordinary violence, thus allowing those readers to validate their own experiences, reconnect with their communities, and forge bonds necessary to organize against structural oppression.

 

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The Colloquium Series offers Glasscock Center Fellows an opportunity to discuss a work-in-progress with faculty and graduate students from different disciplines. By long-standing practice, colloquium presenters provide a draft of their current research, which is made available to members of the Glasscock Center listserv. Each colloquium begins with the presenter’s short (10-15 minute) exposition of the project, after which the floor is open for comments and queries. The format is by design informal, conversational, and interdisciplinary.

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