It’s a (Half)Marathon: A Duoethnography of Two Chinese Female Scholars’ Intersectional Precarity in U.S. Academia

Opening with a parallel of poetry and personal narratives, this duoethnography draws on the theoretical framework of intersectional precarity to explore the entangled academic and personal journeys of how two Chinese female scholars experience and make sense of intersecting racialized, gendered, and sociopolitical inequities in the U.S. Through collaborative, qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews and sister talks took place on our daily running routes, we use metaphors from our long-distance running experiences to illustrate how intersectional precarity enacts as hills (e.g., daily exclusions), pains (e.g., financial and legal insecurity), and exhaustion (e.g., neoliberal academia). By explicitly theorizing and analyzing lived transnational academia and daily life through intersectionality and precarity, this study contributes a theoretical understanding of intersectional precarity as embodied, evolving, and context-specific. Investigating these dynamics through a metaphor-driven duoethnography demonstrates the necessity of reimagining solidarity and care within and beyond academic spaces.