Academic parenthood and ambivalent choice

Abstract In this auto‐ethnography, I draw attention to the inverse relationship between my career trajectory and scholarly productivity to develop a notion of academic parenthood. Importantly, I situate it within the wider feminist scholarship, especially feminist discourse on ambivalent choice and “closure as a political possibility” for the emergence of academic parent of color. Here, I emphasize this emergence as neither linear nor singular but manifesting into a collection of necessary and interrelated lifeworlds. Rather than offer a conclusive argument or a critique of achieving optimal “work‐family balance” in academia, the essay intends to spark further discussions on the ways academic parenthood may be imagined and embraced in its entirety. It also calls for future research into the elision of the image of an academic parent of color from the very spaces and the entire ecosystem of academia.