Care, mothering and the academy : making the invisible visible

Australian historian Carla Pascoe Leahy and Australian sociologist Emilee Gilbert were invited by the editors of Gender & History to produce a short piece on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on academic mothers. It is intended as a companion to an article that Gilbert and Pascoe Leahy have submitted for peer review. Inspired by the concept of ‘presencing’ evoked and explained by the USA-based historian Sarah Knott in a recent History Workshop feature, the authors invited Knott to join them in conversation.1 This piece takes the form of a dialogue between the three scholars in April 2021, passed backwards and forwards across oceans, time zones and disciplines.