A Zoom of One’s Own: A Cyborgian Feminist Experience of Slow Academia in Academic Women’s Writing

Abstract: This article considers our experiences of writing – and writing together – as academic women in post-pandemic times. We begin by acknowledging some of what we have learned from past work on slow academia and on academic women and their writing. We then introduce two theoretical lenses – Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own and Donna Haraway’s conceptualization of cyborg writing – to consider our shared Zoom writing, engaging with the discursive, material, and political dimensions and considering what might be meant by “slowness” in academic contexts such as ours. While Virginia Woolf provides insight into the necessary preconditions for academic women to write, our use of Donna Haraway’s cyborg writing allows a textured and spacious engagement with the complexities, multiplicities, and ambivalences of creating digital rooms of our own where communal writing and thinking can (and sometimes cannot) happen. In locating our present experience of academic work in an ongoing continuum of historical shifts and trends, we seek to articulate a feminist, empowered form of slowness that reflects the academia of our immediate present, rather than that of pre-pandemic times or of the academic generations who came before us. By interspersing the article with snippets of our mundane everyday realities as we come together to write, both online and in person, we attempt to bring into visibility the university worlds that we currently inhabit, and bring into existence the university worlds that we wish to dwell in the future.