Research on higher education students and staff with caring responsibilities has quickly expanded since the 2000s, gaining further momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying disruptions of personal and professional lives. The field attracts growing interest from researchers, policymakers, employers and caregivers themselves. Yet it is also an area which, through its associations with reproductive and women’s work, remains relatively marginalised (Hook et al., 2022). In this blog post, we reflect on findings from a literature review on carers in academia recently published in the Review of Education (Moreau & Wheeler, 2023).
The literature search led to the identification of a total of 158 publications deemed relevant to this research, all of them listed and categorised using a number of tracking tools published as supplementary material to the article as appendices. We included English-language academic texts published between 2010 and 2020, which focused on carers studying or working in a tertiary-level institution. We adopted an inclusive perspective on what counted as ‘care work’ and ‘caring responsibility’, covering parents but also any individual with caring responsibilities for another being, human or non-human. We acknowledge the arbitrary nature of these inclusion criteria and of their interpretation, especially as care is multi-faceted and its contours are not clearly delineated (Tronto, 1993).
Our categorisation and analysis of these texts highlight how extant research is geared towards mothers, particularly student mothers and, more rarely, academic mothers. We came across a large research corpus on women’s academic careers. However, this work does not always centre care and thus was not necessarily included in the review. Overall, caring responsibilities other than the parenting of healthy, abled children tends to be ignored, with only a few texts considering higher education (HE) students or staff caring for an elderly or ill relative or friend. Likewise, studies of care work related to non-humans and to bringing life into the world or to end of life and loss (including miscarriages and stillbirths) remain very much non-existent in higher education research.
