“Zooming In”: Feminism, Storytelling and the Meanders of University Meetings
(2024)
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- Abstract
- Meetings are ubiquitous: they are at the heart not only of decision-making processes in organizations, but also of social movements aiming to make the world more inclusive. However, meetings are rarely viewed as organizational events that might both embody and reproduce or displace gender inequalities. In this article, we address this issue by telling a story: a short fiction that plunges us into the experience of a young female academic who takes part in the late-night meetings of a Belgian research consortium. The story is based on evidence drawn from qualitative and quantitative research on the one hand, and on the personal experience of a female academic on the other. Both evidence and experience have inspired the story, which was written by an author external to the research process. The story helps understand how the gendering of meetings operates, first through an unequal division of the meeting work and burden between men and women; second through an unequal distribution of speech in meeting interactions; and third through a passive exercise of meeting facilitation. The story embodies these results and tells them in a way that brings us as close as possible to the experience lived by the narrator. It is attuned to emotions, provokes reactions such as laughter, and opens up multiple lines of thought that engage the reader with the results, while evoking a sense of compassion and accountability that is lacking in academic writing and explanatory approaches to the social world. The article finally discusses the power of storytelling for developi
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Citations
Thunus, S., Godart, C., & Willem Standaert. (2024). “Zooming In”: Feminism, Storytelling and the Meanders of University Meetings. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/238016