Motherhood in the Academy: How care, fieldwork, and institutional logics shape research-led teaching
Posted on: 7 January 2026 by Eli Saetnan in 2026
Picture yourself at the end of your PhD, just about ready to launch your academic career as a researcher and active contributor to your discipline. At the heart of your research is fieldwork, exciting trips to interesting places perhaps far away from home. At the same time, you would really like to start a family.
Suddenly fieldwork and active participation in your field-based research becomes much more complicated. Do you give up and pause your career for a few years to focus on your family, or do you persevere and continue with your research? These are tough decisions faced by many of our research colleagues. What can we do as a community to support early career researchers through this phase? In this podcast episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Shreyashi Dasgupta about her experiences as a field based researcher and mother.
Shreyashi Dasgupta is an urban geographer specialising in housing, infrastructure, migration and governance in the global South. She is also the Outreach lead for Geography within her department where she hopes to make the discipline more accessible and engaging to people from a wide range of backgrounds. In this podcast, Shreyashi Dasgupta shares her reflections around the challenges and benefits of doing field based research as a new mother. She draws on both her own personal experiences and what she learned from interviewing fellow researcher mothers as part of a recent scholarship project.
If you want to explore this topic further, Shreyashi recommends the following sources as a good starting point:
- Hope, J., Bastia, T., Cox, R., Jenkins, K., Lemanski, C., Mendo, T., Meth, P., Moeller, N., Okafor-Yarwood, I., O’Hare, P., Ray, C., & Williams, G. (2025). Don’t forget the snacks: Doing field research as a parent. In D. Hammett & N. Holmes (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Field Research (1st ed., pp. 129–138). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003404903-21
- Price, M. J., & Hall, A. L. (2024). Situating reproduction: How becoming mothers impacts field work and why it matters. The Professional Geographer, 76(2), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2024.2351842
- Jenkins, K. (2020). Academic motherhood and fieldwork: Juggling time, emotions, and competing demands. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(3), 693–704. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12376