Life Rupture Moments and the Rupture Arc: Grief, Care, and Temporal Disruption in Women's Academic Lives in Mauritius

Abstract

Life rupture moments such as the death of a partner, the onset of chronic illness within the family, or the sudden responsibility of caring for ageing parents create profound disruptions in women’s academic lives. These events fracture identity, destabilise temporal rhythms, and fundamentally reshape scholarly trajectories. Higher education institutions continue to operate under the assumption of uninterrupted productivity, emotional neutrality, and linear career progression. While existing scholarship has examined caregiving and gender inequality in academia, it has largely overlooked crisis-driven disruptions such as bereavement, chronic illness, and sudden caregiving transitions, which are analytically significant events shaping an academic path. This paper examines how women academics in Mauritius navigated crisis while embedded within institutional structures that remain misaligned with the realities of grief, care, and personal upheaval. Drawing on narratives generated during a two-day MomAcademia workshop at the University of Mauritius, the paper analyses the emotional and temporal dimensions of crisis using a feminist interpretivist methodology. The findings are organised through a conceptual framework termed the rupture arc, consisting of six interrelated phases: collapse, suspended time, continuation under institutional time, slow erosion, reconstruction, and the lingering trace. These phases capture the emotional and temporal movements of women’s experiences and reveal the misfit between lived crisis and academic expectations. The rupture arc demonstrates that crises are not short-term interruptions but events that reconfigure academic identity and leave enduring imprints on women’s careers. Participants described navigating suspended cognitive capacity, profound emotional disorientation, forced academic continuity, and long-term career erosion while managing overwhelming grief or caregiving responsibilities. The paper draws on biographical disruption (Bury, 1982), wounded narratives (Frank, 1995), grief scholarship (Zembylas, 2024), temporal politics (Sharma, 2022), and feminist care ethics (Tronto, 2020; Kittay, 2019) to illuminate how crisis challenges institutional logics built on continuity and acceleration. The findings reveal that higher education systems rarely recognise crisis as a legitimate academic disruption, resulting in punitive performance structures, stalled promotions, and neglected emotional labour. The study argues that institutions must move toward crisis-responsive policies, temporal flexibility, grief-informed leadership, and broader recognition of care labour, including elder care and chronic illness care, as central dimensions of academic work. By foregrounding moments of life rupture, this paper offers a new analytic lens for understanding gendered academic inequality in the Global South. It calls for higher education systems to cultivate institutional humanity by acknowledging vulnerability, non-linear career paths, and the emotional realities of scholars’ lives. Recognising the biographical and temporal disruptions of crisis is essential for designing academic cultures that are equitable, compassionate, and responsive to the complexities of women’s lives.