Voices of women: a memory-work reflection on work-life dis/harmony in tourism academia

While other disciplines have engaged with critiquing work-life balance, tourism studies has been slower in acknowledging and critically contesting the notion as it applies to our own academic lives. This paper aims to address this gap through a collective memory-work of how four female tourism academics try to achieve work-life harmony and why it sometimes seems unattainable. In contrast to the masculinist, neoliberalist values of academic performance, achievement and competitiveness; our gendered analysis revealed that we felt more comfortable with the embodied, feminine values of caring, communion and union, or what we refer to as work-life harmony.