Care, critique, and academic survival.
Academic Aunties brings care, criticism, and lived experience to the difficult terrain of university life. Its conversations move from supervision, parenting, menopause, and writing to colonialism, racism, gendered harm, and the politics of coming home.
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Academic Aunties is a thoughtful, politically grounded podcast about academia as lived experience rather than abstract career ladder. The show listens closely to the people who move through universities while carrying family histories, health changes, caregiving responsibilities, racialized expectations, and unfinished political questions. It can be practical. It can also be heavy. Episodes consider the choice of a graduate supervisor, the strain of academic parenting, and the need for writing structures that make life possible instead of postponing it. The show also reaches beyond campus routines. Conversations about returning home to the Philippines, teaching differently, and researching homelands open onto colonialism, exile, democratic struggle, and scholarly erasure. The university is treated as an institution that can produce knowledge while also reproducing harm. That tension gives the show its force. Academic Aunties is especially strong when it asks what care means inside systems built around extraction, hierarchy, and constant intensification of labor. Its conversations on perimenopause and menopause reject quick fixes and product-driven narratives, placing health inside capitalism, public health, race, gender, and the neoliberal workplace. Episodes on gendered racism and sexual violence attend to how institutions punish people for naming harm or supporting those who do. The show does not flatten these subjects into slogans. It lets guests describe the texture of navigating home, school, research, law, family, and professional life. There is room for warmth, humor, and pop culture too. A discussion of murder mysteries and auntie figures sits comfortably beside questions about love, desire, and alternative life paths. That range matters. Academic Aunties understands that scholarly life is also ordinary life: children, bodies, grief, books, friendships, exhaustion, and stubborn joy. Its editorial center is mentorship, but not in the tidy motivational sense. Mentorship here means ethical responsibility, collective survival, and making room for more people to enter without asking them to disappear. The result is a show for listeners who want analysis with care, and care with a backbone.
Made for: For graduate students, faculty, researchers, academic parents, and anyone thinking critically about universities, especially listeners navigating race, gender, care, and institutional pressure.
What sets it apart: Academic Aunties stands out by joining practical academic advice to decolonial and lived analysis. It treats pop culture, supervision, health, parenting, and political struggle as connected parts of the same institutional life.
Academia. It is a site of exclusion. For those of us who are first-generation, who are racialized, who are women, and who inhabit social locations that are traditionally unrepresented in this space, academia is full of landmines. This is why we need academic aunties. This podcast will bring you stories and advice about how to navigate this treacherous world and maybe even plant the seeds for structural transformation. Come listen to Auntie Ethel and her friends. Episodes drop monthly. Message us on Twitter at @AcademicAuntie and visit us online at academicaunties.com.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Academic Aunties makes the care labor beneath academic careers visible through candid personal framing and searching guest conversations.
Academic Aunties turns academic life into a candid conversation about the work, care, and relationships hidden beneath professional expectations. Dr.
Academic survival gets the auntie treatment, so you can set boundaries without pretending institutions are innocent.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A mystery conversation about aunties, place, and why popular fiction deserves attention.
This episode follows Uzma Jalaluddin's turn toward detective fiction and keeps its eye on the pleasures of murder mystery while treating aunties as more than a side note.
A steady, humane look at midlife change and the systems surrounding it.
Perimenopause and menopause are treated as part of real life here, not as a problem to be solved or sold. The discussion stays close to bodies, work, race, and gender expansive experience, along with the pressure to keep performing inside institutions that ask for more than they…
A clear, ethical look at how supervision shapes graduate work and the people who do it.
Picking a supervisor is framed as one of the most consequential choices graduate students make, and the stakes are laid out without exaggeration. The decision can shape a dissertation, influence job applications, and leave a mark on the rest of a graduate and postgraduate path.
A grounded look at academic life, parenting, and the support around both.
Academic Antis follows what it cost Dr. Ethel Tungohan to build an academic life while raising a child. It moves through a pregnancy discovered during a job interview, a cross-country move, and a birth just a month after starting a faculty position at York, all while she kept…
A grounded conversation about making academic work more manageable.
January opens by drawing a clear line around urgency. Dr. Ethel Tunkohan speaks with Tobin LeBlanc-Haley and Laura Pinn about making academic work more manageable, from email habits to the boundaries written into a syllabus.
Campus radio from the wrong side of reality.
Campus decisions, Northeast news, and Northeast priorities.
How research culture changes in practice.
Conversations from inside the IT channel.
Academic Aunties opens season seven by asking "Do our jobs still matter?" with guests Dr.
Uzma Jaliluddin joins the show for a lively conversation about her detective novels.
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This episode explores decolonizing academia, addressing racist perceptions in university spaces, and the importance of mentorship and representation for marginalized communities.
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This episode features an interview with Dr.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
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This episode features an interview with Sara Ahmed discussing her book 'The Feminist Killjoy Handbook' and its insights into feminist activism, institutional critique, and the experiences of women of color in academia.