Co-imagining institutions as collective spaces of care

"The tendencies for dominant discourses to individualise responsibility and privilege market rationalities, don’t only reduce the space for politics and contestation. They reduce the space for thinking and acting relationally and thereby also thinking and acting care-fully." Bond (2019, p. 17)

Exploring the dynamics and relationships that affect people’s capacity to care and ultimately, to become more response-able, we encourage you in this lesson to begin thinking further about care-full scholarly practice as a collective endeavour for which many different individuals and organisations have a shared responsibility.

In particular, we are interested here in what makes for a care-full institutional setting and accordingly, what might be (or, for you, already are) some of the challenges faced in practicing care-full scholarship from within the context of an institutional setting?

To paraphrase Giambartolomei (2022) ‘A crucial question that remains to be answered in the case of institutions, is how the pursuit of caring-with and a sense of collective responsibility and engagement are better supported and enabled in practice’?

In the first of the below guest video contributions addressing this subject, Dr Colin Anderson reflects further on this issue in connection with the need to overcome a legacy of institutions de-humanising individual staff members.

In the next three guest video contributions, we hear from early career scholars Dr Gloria Giambartolomei, Jingjing Guo and Imogen Humphris on some of the things that they believe need to be changed in order for academic institutions to function as collective spaces of care.

The remainder of the guest video contributions towards co-imagining institutions as collective spaces of care come from some of our more senior guest contributors: Dr Lucy Aphramor, Dr Geraldine Brownand Dr Chiara Tornaghi.

Their contributions begin with Lucy making a connection between the pressures of academia and white supremacy, and accordingly the importance of countering this through compassion for self and for others.

Geraldine speaks about collective spaces of care from a starting point of her commitment to improving equality, diversity and inclusion.

And finally, in a double contribution from Chiara, we hear firstly about the challenge of negotiating the multiple demands of academia in a way which does not erode what we care for and the ways in which we practice care giving...

... and secondly from Chiara, her ideas on some of the changes required in order to ensure that collective spaces of care-full scholarship become the norm both within and beyond academia.

Both the early career and more senior guest contributors featured on this page have identified a number of tensions and harmful dimensions of academic institutions. They have also given a series of suggestions and practical examples of how to evolve academic institutions into collective spaces of care.

Which of their points resonate with you? Are there other points or suggestions which you would add? For example:

QUESTIONS:

• Should there be more time granted to the sharing of and digging into existing knowledge rather than creating more?
• How to you hold the tension between the necessary slowness of doing care-full research with the demand of finishing an academic paper?
• Are there any areas you have had to 'accept a defeat' in your own care-full scholarship?
• Are you intentionally generous towards your colleagues in pain whilst still expecting the best of them?
• In what ways can you shape the environment you work in?
• If you are based in, or have experience of working in, a non-academic institution, how does this compare?