Using Literature Reviews to Research Marginalized Groups: The Case of Research on Carers in Higher Education

In this case study we reflect on a review we conducted of the English-language research literature on carers in academia. For the purpose of this study, we define a carer as an individual who self-identifies as having caring responsibilities, including, but not limited to, individuals looking after children, parents, grandparents, other relatives, and friends. This emerging field is expanding quickly, possibly because the COVID-19 pandemic has generated new interest in the ways care work intersects with other work. Researching care is a matter of social justice because care work has culturally been associated with women and marginalized groups and undervalued. Academic cultures have been described as “care-less” through their misrecognition of care. Similar in this to higher education itself, research on higher education turns care into an absent presence. Consistent with the feminist poststructuralist theories informing our work, we call for critical literature reviews that reflect on who and what gets to be represented and how in research texts, taking carers in academia as an example. In addition to describing the tools and techniques we used to identify and categorize the research texts, we discuss the representations of various categories of carers in the literature. Drawing on an analysis of 158 texts that met the inclusion criteria, we contend that the literature tends to consolidate a number of cultural norms, including a representation of care work as “women’s work” and a model of the family that fails to capture the diversity of family norms. We point out the need for reflexivity to appreciate how processes of knowledge production can contribute to the reproduction, or challenge, of social injustices .