The Domestic Academics Quilt
The Domestic Academics: Finding the time to write and care. Storying the gendered inequalities of academic research in the global pandemic was a project devised, organised and run by Vanessa Marr from the University of Brighton.
This project brings together twenty-three women academics with caring responsibilities from across the UK, each of whom responded to a call to create a quilt panel that reflects their experience of working as an academic during the COVID-19 lockdowns from March 2020 to the Spring of 2021. They collaborated through a series of online workshops, finding strength and solidarity in the sharing of their stories through stitch and conversation. Please visit the Domestic Academic Quilt website to see the quilt, and click on each square to hear the stories.
I AM SORRY – I HAVE NOTHING LEFT
This message—shared with my family, friends, children, students, colleagues, and employers—was my way of saying I was completely overwhelmed. Burned out. Like so many others navigating caregiving, work, and community responsibilities during the pandemic, I had reached my limit.
My contribution to the Domestic Academic Quilt was a personal and political response to that moment. As a mother, I was deeply frustrated by the way those with primary caring responsibilities—especially mothers and children—were being overlooked by political decisions and media narratives.
Drawing inspiration from the clubs, badges, and recorded phone lines of the 1980s and 90s that I grew up with—and fuelled by the absence of meaningful answers—I created a speculative club of my own. My quilt section included a badge and helpline for those, like me, feeling unheard, exhausted, and sidelined.
Although deeply personal, the project was also a collective call: to connect the overlapping experiences of those who, during Boris Johnson’s government, were being persistently ignored. These included:
Educational inequality and exam chaos
Inaccessible maternity services for partners and support networks
Playground and playgroup closures
Misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine, particularly regarding pregnancy, lactation, and fertility
Job loss, redundancy, and discrimination in precarious work
Food insecurity, and failures around free school meals and food bank access
The pressures of remote learning, home-schooling, bubble closures, and disrupted university admissions
Limited access to exercise, mental health support, and long COVID care
This was my way of stitching together grief, rage, care, and resistance—using design to speak to what wasn’t being said.
