Life and Lemons: Struggling with Productivity During a Pandemic

If the academic environment depends on the violent directive to “publish or perish,” what happens when we are trying to publish while lives and ways of living are perishing? Stemming from the real need to create a final paper for a spring 2020 feminist ethnography class, this paper explores what it is like to be a person trying to write an academic paper during a pandemic, while finding oneself both utterly incapable of thinking about anything but an invisible virus. Mixing creative nonfiction, autoethnography and journal entries, the author questions the limits and harms of maintaining a dedication to academic productivity during a pandemic.