FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Throughout this process the question I have been asked most frequently is, 'Why go back to school at your age?' As I worked my way through interviewing women across Canada, I learned that many other late-entry doctoral students were often asked this same question. One woman even had someone say to her, 'At your age you don't need a PhD.' It is my hope that this site provides not only the women who participated in my research, but also other curious people, some insight into the reasons why some of us have returned to school, (at our age!) and some of our obstacles, influences and successes along the way.
Echoes of Late-Entry Women in Academia
Justine Skahan, Family books (detail)
graphite on hydrostone. 2010
How many women took part in your study?
Thirty-nine women took part. There was at least one participant from every Canadian province.
What were the participants' ages at the time of the study?
The participants' ages ranged from 37 to 77. I decided that if a woman felt 'older' in the university setting, then, indeed, she qualified for the study.
How did you choose the images for your site?
Some of the women sent me the images and the accompanying text. In some cases, I have chosen an image to go with parts of interviews which I found especially compelling. I have narrated the text that accompanies the slides.
Publications
Cullinan, M. (2016) Echoes of the Invisible Women in Academia -a poem. In J. White, Permission - The International Interdisciplinary Impact of Laurel Richardson's Work. Victoria University, Australia by Sense Publishers (2016)
http://www.springer.com/ 9783319971056
Mitchell, C., MacEntee, Cullinan, M., & Allison, P. (2019). Working with photographs: Seeing, looking, and visual representation as professional learning. In K. Pithouse-Morgan, D. Pillay, & C. Mitchell (Eds.), Memory Mosaics: Researching teacher professional learning through artful memory-work. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Pillay, D., Cullinan, M., & Moodley, L. (2019). Creative nonfiction narratives and memory-work: Pathways for women teacher-researchers' scholarship of ambiguity and openings. In K. Pithouse-Morgan, D. Pillay, & C. Mitchell (Eds.), Memory Mosaics: Researching teacher professional learning through artful memory-work. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Here is a link to an interview with McGill University.
http://tracemcgill.com/mary-cullinan/
Any more questions? Please send them on to me: mary.cullinan@mail.mcgill.ca