Vietnamese university teacher mothers’ juggling roles when teaching online

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s lives have been affected on a global scale. In academia in particular, the focus has been on the challenges of academic mothers juggling their careers with raising children during social distancing time. The excessive demand of work changes such as the conversion to online teaching and family increasing attention has given rise to additional workload and negative emotional responses of university teacher mothers. Analysing in-depth interviews with nine Vietnamese university teacher mothers of young children, this article shows how they had to reorganise their work-life structure as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The article features the challenges and struggles of teacher mothers as they had to teach from home and homeschool their children at the same time, while navigating the ‘new normal’ situation in a way that least possible affected their life and work organisation. The article also unveils the lack of support from family members and the workplaces of the university teacher mothers and questions the gendered burden and inequality entailed by the pandemic. The study highlights how resilient the university teacher mothers were with constant changes in their personal and professional lives due to the pandemic. We argue that the new situation provided a unique opportunity for university teacher mothers to re-imagine their teaching practices and maternity performances in an interlacing way that they might not hitherto have considered .