Being a transnational researcher and a mother amid the COVID-19 crisis

The article focuses on the author’s experience as a transnational researcher during the early months of the COVID-19 outbreak (January–April 2020), and discusses the possibilities and impossibilities of the COVID-19 pandemic for mothers who are transnational researchers.

The sociological approach of institutional ethnography is utilised to analyse entries from the author’s diary, articles and videos from mass media, posts on social media, and institutional texts (for example, regulations, policies).

The disjunctures between the different versions of reality (the author’s experiential perspective versus the ruling perspectives of the various institutions that framed the author’s experience at different stages) are discussed from the author’s standpoint as an international researcher, a woman and a single mother.