DMP_1466 A woman's place is at the chalkface: using autoethnography alongside allegory to inform historical fiction writing

As creative practice-led research is a field that is growing and includes a variety of experimental designs, this research project aimed to fill the current gap in the literature with a hybrid approach that incorporated autoethnography, allegory and extended metaphor, Todorov's narrative theory of equilibrium and historical (archival) research methods.

The contextual background derived from my experiences of teaching in a high-school between March and August 2020 after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Australia. My research design made a comparison of female and governmental officials' responses during the 'Spanish' pneumonic influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Both health disasters disrupted societal functioning and traces of policies that historically disadvantaged women through an expectation they would shoulder the burden of caring for their communities can still be found today.