Can we do this together? Exploring the transformative potential of care for academic work,labor,and life

Abstract

Through a reflective account of our own experiences as early career academics, we explore the nuanced ways in which care materializes and is embodied in the micro-relations and mundane practices that constitute academic life. By emphasizing the affective dimension of an ethic of care, we bring the destabilizing and unsettling promise of affect to bear on our understanding of care and, in turn, highlight care’s transformative potential. We show how care, when mobilized by affect, manifests in ambiguous and at times contradictory ways, which leaves us asking whether care can be a straightforward and unproblematic antidote to feelings of dissatisfaction with neoliberal institutions. Yet, at the same time, we speculate that care holds rich potential to problematize the structural norms and demands that organize our academic (work) lives, and to offer new and different ways of living instead.

Keywords

Affect care early career research neoliberal university writing differently

What is my plan

What will I learn about myself here

What would I do in this situation

How is my life the same as this one

What does this setting offer me today

Which questions am I asking

How fast do I want to go

Who do I want to be

What can I hear

What do I want to say

Who could I work with

What would a sharing of space mean

Can we do this together

What makes me happy

What am I frightened of

How much power can I have and what will I do with it

Where shall we go together

What does love sound like

What do I really want

Is this enough

How much time do I need

What difference can I make

What can an understanding of language do

Is this really what I want to do

How should it end

—Lubaina Himid, “Audiences as Performers” (2021)

Lubaina Himid, a Black British artist, invites her audience to engage with her artworks as performers, blurring the personal and political, encouraging thier active participation with her work instead of passive observation. Her artwork asks questions of the viewers, encouraging them “to consider how the built environment, history, personal relationships, and conflict” shape their lives (Tate, 2022). The questions above are envisioned as starting points for conversation and for taking action. Himid’s work reminds us, as authors and early career scholars, of the agency we have to make change, but it also asks us to consider what kinds of “spaces and materials we need to imagine and make freely” (Tate, 2022) in our academic lives.

We use Himid’s questions as a departure point to explore the conditions of contemporary academia and the practices that help us not only make do with those conditions, but resist and alter them. In particular, we share our lived experience as early career academics in the field of management to illustrate the complex and situated unfolding of care—as a “political, affective, and embodied process” (Fotaki, 2023: 12)—in our everyday academic lives and consider its potential to transform how we experience and engage in academic work. We draw attention to the caring relationalities that are ever-present, yet often go unnoticed (Fotaki et al., 2020), in the mundane flows of academic work. We also bring to light the transformative potential of care, which enables us to push against the normative standards that shape our work and encourages us to imagine new and different ways of living in academia.

How is my life the same as this one?

Critiques of the neoliberal university, and the (disembodied) subjectivities it requires, have proliferated in recent years. Many have bemoaned the increasing marketization of the contemporary university (Parker, 2014; Parker and Jary, 1995), the emergence of “fast academia” (Carrigan, 2015; Gill, 2010), and the way an unswerving adherence to neoliberal ideologies breeds “toxic” work cultures (Smyth, 2017: 55). Parker (2021) contends that the business school is a particularly intense example of these new working conditions in academia: rapidly expanding student numbers, overwhelming workloads, and metric-based surveillance mechanisms that encourage competition at both individual and institutional levels (Jones et al., 2020; McCann et al., 2020; Ratle et al., 2020). As such, values in many UK-based institutions are increasingly shifting away from the “transformative and emancipatory purpose of education” toward that of the corporate university (Morrish and Sauntson, 2013: 62). As a result, Morrish and The Analogue University Writing Collective (2017: 26) describe academic worth as having been reduced to a “bundle of metrics,” which has left some academics with a persistent and haunting sense of “dislocation”—of “being in the wrong place, of playing a role” (Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012: 99). An unfolding crisis of mental and physical health in academia follows in the wake of this shift (Dufty-Jones and Gibson, 2022; Gill, 2010; Hurd and Singh, 2021).

Some modes of resistance and collective organizing, including formal union action and informal activism, have been effective in contesting the neoliberal ideologies that pervade our academic lives (Bowes-Catton et al., 2020; Morrish 2017). However, several scholars have shown that, despite their best efforts, academics are often unable to resist the asymmetrical power structures of the neoliberal university (McCann et al., 2020; Parker and Jary, 1995) and are impotent in the face of changing work conditions (Gill, 2010; Parker, 2014). Moreover, Ashcraft (2017) points out that many “academics, even the critically inclined, tend not to resist” (p. 44; see also Morrish, 2017). We therefore find ourselves in an academic setting where subverting and resisting dominant practices are difficult, though not impossible (Nordbäck et al., 2022), which makes us wonder how the neoliberal ideology might be shaping how we conduct our work as early career academics (Ashcraft, 2017; Morrish, 2017; Morrish and Sauntson, 2013) and how we can belong in academia if we do not subscribe to its dominant norms (Probyn, 2016).

Existing research recognizes that an ethic of care can be an effective mode of resistance to neoliberal institutions, including academia (Butler et al., 2017; The Care Collective, 2021 [2020]), by disrupting the neoliberal market logic and unveiling the power structures that underpin them (Fotaki, 2023). The ethics of care is rooted in feminist politics and research and is broadly understood, within this realm, as an approach to morality that stands in opposition to an ethic of justice by foregrounding the needs of others and prioritizing relations over individuals (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984). Moving beyond conceptions of care as a moral order, Tronto (1998) has posited care as a situated social practice rather than an individual disposition that is “easy to sentimentalize and privatize” (p. 118). This places care as a central and ongoing dimension of relationships, regardless of whether its effects and outcomes are positive or negative.

Since Liedtka’s (1996) probing study of whether organizations “care” and whether the ethic of care can create possibilities “for simultaneously enhancing both the effectiveness and the moral quality of organizations” (p. 179), care has increasingly become a topic of interest within organizational settings. For instance, scholars have explored diversity management (Johansson and Wicksröm, 2022); caring narrative practices and their relation to the possibility of action (Lawrence and Maitlis, 2012); the tensions between caring for, or about, one’s work and caring for one’s coworkers (Antoni et al., 2020); and how care can flourish in a variety of organizational contexts (Fotaki et al., 2020).

Within academic settings, care is often positioned as an antidote to the struggles of the neoliberal university and, more recently, the intensification of workload—both personal and professional—experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic (Benozzo et al., 2021). As such, it is not surprising that many of our peers have sought concrete practices to build solidarity, resist the “neoliberal performance regime” (Burton, 2021; Dufty-Jones and Gibson, 2022; Plotnikof and Utoft, 2022: 1268), and make our academic existence richer and more pleasurable. These practices include slow scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015; Ulmer, 2017), being “lazy” (Shahjahan, 2015), and creating spaces where positive peer-to-peer interactions can flourish (Nicholls et al., 2021). Similarly, being collegial (Gavin et al., 2023), academic friendship (Enslin and Hedge, 2019), and practicing forgiveness (Śliwa and Prasad, 2022) have been posed as possibilities for togetherness and solidarity that can help us move toward a “collectivized identity” of “caring scholars” (Power and Bergan, 2019: 433).

While practices of care and the acts of kindness toward self and others that these researchers promote might address the troubles experienced by academics working in the context of the neoliberal university, their outcomes are often expressed as unequivocally positive. Care, however, is not simply about smoothing out our differences or reducing conflict, it can be exclusionary, and have other negative effects, as it directs attention toward specific concerns, situations, or groups over others (Martin et al., 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, 2017). In academic contexts, care (and the labor involved) can raise dilemmas and have significant costs (Hughes et al., 2007). Hence, we seek to build on conversations about care in academia to better understand the complexity and nuance of care as a phenomenon that is not solely positive or good. We do so by turning to the micro level in which the “relational encounter[s]” (Fotaki et al., 2020: 4) of care unfold in our everyday academic lives (see, e.g. Gill (2010) on staff–student supervisory relationships) and ask how the dynamics of care actually unfold in mundane academic practices.

In asking this question, we hope to reverse, or at least challenge, the logic of care as a series of intentional, often benevolent, practices with positive outcomes that dominates conversations around care as resistance in academia. Instead, we explore and emphasize the affective “dimension” (Fotaki, 2023; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 5) of care and consider the implications of this emphasis on the “destabilizing” and “unsettling” promise of affect (Fotaki et al., 2017: 3) for understanding how care emerges, or is produced, for early career academics—beyond the remit of human agency (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). We offer contributions to the literature on care, and specifically care in neoliberal institutions, by exploring the nuances of how care unfolded during a particular juncture in our academic lives. In doing so, we stress the transformative, but also contradictory, qualities of care: both care’s capacity to open up sites of resistance to the individualized neoliberal performance regimes that currently dominate academic spaces and practices and its potentially ambiguous effects. We show that while care may foster solidarity and community-building in academia, it is by no means unproblematic or without tension, and, crucially, that the impetus to care persists beyond individual agency.

What is my plan?

In writing this article, we seek to produce a speculative work that is deliberately open-ended and shows the unfolding of our “vulnerable relational knowing” (Meriläinen et al., 2022; see also Jaramillo et al., 2023), to expose the “ambivalence and uncertainty” of early career life (Humphreys, 2005: 855), and to participate in a process of writing and researching differently (Boncori, 2022; Gilmore et al., 2019). We hope to engage in conversation and in writing that might “unsettle” and “reconfigure” how we live our academic lives (Plotnikof and Utoft, 2022: 1259). However, our goal is not to offer a critique of academic workplaces from a moral high ground of “caring scholars,” but to write personal accounts of what it is like to grapple with care—to care, to be cared for, to theorize care, and to nurture it—while also at the same time being deeply implicated in academic systems and structures that shape how care manifests.

Like Himid’s art, we aspire to forge connections between us and our readers to resist the individualization of thinking and, as such, invite our audience to join us in a collective web of knowledge-making (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012). We proceed by setting out our attempts to grapple with care theoretically, following the iterative movements of our thoughts as we tentatively made connections across concepts. Our efforts to make sense of our emergent theoretical understanding of care and affect are followed with “fleshy” (Huopalainen and Satama, 2019)—embodied and emotional—experiences from our own academic lives. In sharing our lived experience, we hope not only to illustrate the potential for care ever-present in our everyday academic lives, but also to invite our readers to reflect on care in relation to their own academic lives, and so to enable more care further “down the line” (Ashcraft, 2017: 46).

Throughout the text, we use sidenotes to “bridge reading, writing and thinking” (Brewis and Silverwood, 2020: 67), to speak to each other and our readers, and to track how our own thoughts developed “in relation to the text” (Brewis and Silverwood, 2020: 67), suggesting a layering of different “temporalities of writing” (Lerner, 2017). As such, the sidenotes reflect our speculative thinking and uncertainties that emerged in our conversations with one another prior to setting down the words in this article, and appear intermittently in italics through the text.

What can I hear?

When I’m asked “What do you mean by care?” somehow I’m still at a loss for an answer

The ethics of care has gained prominence as a subject of (often feminist) investigations over the past several decades, yet the definition of care remains contested (Fotaki et al., 2020). Early writings on care (Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984; and later Tronto, 1993) have demonstrated the ways in which a relational ethic of care eschews dichotomies between emotion and reason, and mind and body, and stands in opposition to abstract duties and principles of justice. Hence, Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher (1990) have defined care as including “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (p. 34). Hence, care is not concerned with establishing a moral order or a hierarchy of values, but is rather seen as an “emergent capacity,” a “collective knowledgeable doing,” and a distributed, situated “competence” (Gherardi and Rodeschini, 2015: 3). By placing us in relation to others, care invokes a sense of “response-ability,” or collective knowing and doing (Haraway, 2016: 34), which encompasses a “willingness to respond” (Martin et al., 2015: 634) and a sensitivity “to the constitutive otherness of both self and community” (Duclos and Criado, 2019: 160). In line with this view, care, in the words of Puig de la Bellacasa (2012), is “concomitant to life” (p. 198), rather than forced upon living beings as a moral order.

Relatedly, care is seen as emerging from the embodied and affective recognition of the needs of others (Johansson and Wicksröm, 2022). Fotaki (2023), in particular, draws out the relational and intersubjective nature of care, describing it as grounded in our “embodied vulnerability,” or intrinsic dependence on others. As such, she considers care to be a “profoundly political, affective and embodied process” (Fotaki, 2023: 12). The “political” nature of care stems from its “transformative” potential (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 67) and its “productivity,” in the sense that it inspires diverse ethical and political commitments that might push against “hegemonic formations” (Martin et al., 2015: 634).

Despite the emphasis on embodied and relational aspects of care inherent in these approaches, we found ourselves grappling with a widely held conception of care that flattens the affective dimension of care into a feeling or an emotion—a flattening rooted in the lay understanding of care, which often evokes images of undervalued caring labor people (often women) undertake in their personal lives (e.g. mothers) or professionally (nurses, teachers, social care workers), or else conceptualizes care as an action undertaken by one person toward another (making someone dinner or a cup of tea). In either case, care holds positive connotations related to nurturing, comfort, attachment, and loving relationships (Fotaki, 2017; Lawrence and Maitlis, 2012), and is ascribed to discrete (human) subjects. Its theorizations therefore often lean toward a humanistic ontology in which caring is an action undertaken by an intentional (human) agent—perhaps due to an emphasis on the often invisible and undervalued labor of care (Fotaki, 2023; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), and on who delivers or receives care (Tronto, 1993, 2013).

I feel a kind of reliance, a “natural” way of thinking.

The path of least resistance

We are bothstuck pushingagainsthumanistconventions

We have found a key to grasping the affective dimension of care that might help us push against the humanism, intentionality, and benevolence coded in some of the rhetoric around care in Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, which has become a touchstone for our own thinking and writing about care. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017: 20) draws out the affective, ethical, and material (or embodied) nature of care by conceptualizing it as a “thick mesh of relational obligation” that is “distributed across a multiplicity of agencies and materials”—a definition that extends care’s remit beyond human agency (Fotaki et al., 2020). More explicitly, Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) writes that care “joins together an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (p. 42, emphasis ours). Elsewhere in her text she refers to care as a “speculative affective mode” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 66), argues that care has “affective implications” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 5), and writes that “affect/affections” is one of the three “dimensions” of care (the other two being labor/work and ethics/politics). It is these references to affect that intrigue us and suggest, to us, a curious theoretical opening that might allow us to explore further the implications of designating care as an affective state or mode and to untangle the nuances of what it means to say that care is an “affective mode” as opposed to saying that care has “affective implications.”

I try to resist thinking only from the human body, to resist a sort of deliberate caring

What do I want to say?

What if we can get away . . . do something more radical, push the boundaries, with affect?

Wanting to push against the flattening of the affective component of care, we started by asking ourselves: What if affect is not just something that care has, or evokes, but a pre-subjective relational force (Massumi, 2002) that produces or mobilizes caring capacities and relations? Can this understanding help us challenge the still-dominant idea that care is an intentional act? And what would the implications of this theoretical shift be for how we enact care in our academic lives? These questions prompted us to speculate that paying attention to affective forces might reverse the logic of caring as done by (often human) agents, as has often been the case in research that posits care and caring practices as an antidote to the neoliberal university. Moreover, it might highlight, instead, the transformative potential of care—what Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) calls its intimate entanglement “in the ongoing material remaking of the world” (p. 31), and what we envision as the capacity to transform our academic lives from within.

Similarly to care, there is no single generalizable theory of affect (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 3). Massumi (2002: 35) describes affect as an “intensity” or “force” that “escapes confinement” and names that which “eludes form, cognition and meaning” (Gherardi, 2017: 349; Massumi, 1995). Affects operate at the level of the ordinary, in the “minuscule or molecular events of the unnoticed” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 2), and manifest as “varied surging capacities to affect and be affected” that can diminish or strengthen a body’s capacity to act as they combine or cancel each other out (Fox and Alldred, 2022; Stewart, 2007: 1). Hence, as Gherardi et al. (2018: 300) remind us, following Spinoza and Deleuze, affect is non-subjective and anti-representationalist: affects do not belong to a subject but “reside in the mediating space between subject and object” (Anderson, 2014: 161). On this view, affect is not a single happening or event—an emotion or feeling—but rather “a flow of entangled forces, which remain in excess of the practices of the human ‘speaking subject’” (Gherardi, 2017: 348; Massumi, 1995). These elusive, invisible forces and resonances circulate in the spaces between things (Fox and Alldred, 2017), holding rich potential to destabilize, unsettle, and displace the dominant flows of practicing to bring about new states of being (Fotaki et al., 2017; Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2002).

Affect allows us to decentre care . . . away from the individual and towards the collective

Thinking with affect therefore chimes with a relational view of the world, where people and things are continuously “connecting and disconnecting in a fluctuating network of existential events”—a “restless scene of flowing parts” that gives priority to materials and forces rather than individuals and objects (Cooper, 2005: 1689). Here, there is no bounded, causal agent, or a pre-formed “caring” actor. Rather, “everything is unfinished, infinite, permanently suspended in a state of kaleidoscopic variability” (Cooper, 2005: 1691). Objects, such as the body, are temporary manifestations of the connections and disconnections they are part of. Thus, we talk of the body before the subject as it advances toward subjectivity (Manning, 2010) and think with bodies in becoming: emerging amid a “wild assemblage” of influences, intensities, and potentialities (Gherardi, 2017; Manning, 2016; Stewart, 2005: 1029).

Theories of affect therefore press us away from individuals or collectives and the ways in which they move things, and instead ask us to attend to the choreography of movements and rhythms that become meaningful as they unsettle our ways of being (Manning, 2016). Fotaki et al. (2017) describe affect as a “force” that places people (and we would add, things) “in a co-subjective circuit of feeling and sensation, rather than standing alone and independent” (p. 4). To this end, affect highlights the importance of paying attention to the interdependency of bodies, both human and non-human, and the intensities and feelings that arise between them prior to their categorization and naming (Fox and Alldred, 2017). Emphasizing the “affect/affections” dimension of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 5) therefore presses us to consider care as a “bodily capacity” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 2) that is mobilized by affect. This mode of thinking insists on a decentering of the caring agent to instead prioritize the circumstances of care’s emergence, and shifts emphasis from discrete acts of care (giving and receiving care) to caring relations—their conditions of possibility, and their manifestations in our lives.

Where shall we go together?

This article emerged from a friendship that developed in 2018 as we shared long commutes from the city where we both lived to the university where we worked, once or twice a week, in early mornings. Our early conversations revolved around work, as we shared experience and learned from one another (Callagher et al., 2021), talking about the things that gave us pleasure and made us happy in our work(ing lives) and equally about feeling drained, worn out, anxious, and time-pressed (Gill, 2010). We shared a feeling of “trouble” (Haraway, 2016: 1) with the norms and demands of neoliberal academia, and a desire for a different future. In a bid to envision this alternative future for ourselves—and others—in academia, we went on to organize and deliver a research methods workshop for doctoral students in 2022. The workshop spanned 3 days online and in-person and explored theories of affect and care in qualitative research methods. It represented a textured moment (Ashcraft, 2017, 2018) when our paths crossed with a particular intensity, offering us an opportunity not only to think and write, together, about the affective dimension of care, but also to pay attention to the materializations of care in our own academic lives.

Our reflections on how each of us experienced the workshop therefore form the focus of the empirical part of this article. In presenting our lived experience of early career life, we follow the lineage of those asserting that our “work” lives, and our bodies at work, are inseparable from our “personal” lives (Katila, 2019; Van de Berg, 2021); bringing to light formerly taboo subjects relating to bodies, identities, and emotions in academic work (Boncori and Smith, 2019; Mandalaki and Prasad, 2024; Pérezts, 2022); engaging in corporeal processes of meaning- and knowledge-making (Ellingson, 2017; Thanem and Knights, 2019); and seeking to transform “silenced and private embodied experiences” into “shared and collective” ones (Núñez Casal, 2021: 23).

At the time of writing (and of the workshop), Anna was an education-focused academic—a high-status occupation that is often subject to within-group stigmatization that stems from others mostly within research-intensive institutions (Bamber et al., 2023)—and Olga has been navigating a series of fixed-term postdoctoral contracts in UK and European institutions since completing her PhD in 2020. Both authors are able-bodied white women, and therefore occupy a position of both privilege and disadvantage in contemporary universities. It is the dynamics of our work lives as early career academics that we foreground in this article, over other aspects of our positionality that have nonetheless informed our experience.

The article is underpinned by several different sources of “data” and modes of “data collection.” To systematically generate insights or data that form the crux of the theoretical sections of this article, we recorded and transcribed a series of Zoom conversations over a period of 6 months, December 2022 through May 2023, in which we explored our theoretical apprehensions of care and affect. We then engaged in poetic inquiry as a means of conducting an embodied and affective reading of the transcripts of our conversations, following the method set out by Van Amsterdam et al. (2023). Those conversations are now at the core of this article’s theoretical sections (What can we hear? and What do we want to say?), and our poetic inquiry forms the basis of the text in the sidenotes.

What if we think about caring relations informing our becoming, a coalescing of forces and potentials that shape our bodily materialities, and realities?

Our next step in writing this article was to refract the theory through our own experience and consider how caring relationalities materialized in our interactions. This culminated in us writing our personal narratives, which we share in the section that follows (What makes me happy? What am I frightened of?). We began constructing these narratives by each writing separate accounts of our experiences organizing and running the methods workshop together. We focused our narratives on the “ordinary” (Stewart, 2007: 4) aspects of our lives, including scenes “of both liveness and exhaustion” (Stewart, 2007: 1). We allowed our bodies and our feelings to take space in the text as we experimented with messy, embodied writing (Gilmore et al., 2019; Pullen and Rhodes, 2008), and reflected on how our academic work related to personal and geopolitical events. We then engaged in a critique of each other’s accounts, encouraging one another to surface the affective nature of our experiences. Often this involved highlighting instances of what we might label as “care” or “caring relationalities” and working backward to identify the conditions in which they arose. Each new draft brought to light new possibilities of care.

Of course, we did not get it right straight away, and our texts, while resonating with reviewers, left them wondering if we really were describing affects as ongoing and emergent relational enactments (Ashcraft, 2017). The first round of reviews made us realize we were still stuck in the confessional mode (Ashcraft, 2017) of traditional autoethnographic approaches (Ellis et al., 2011), foregrounding our identities, rather than giving way to the forces, capacities, and intensities we wanted to bring to light. Pressed to return to and revise our narratives, we attempted to construct them to invoke Ashcraft’s (2017: 36) inhabited criticism, an approach that requires “dwelling in and up close with” the objects of critique (Ashcraft, 2017: 37) to generate new habits of “speculative and concrete attunement” (Stewart, 2007: 128), or, as Ashcraft (2017) explains, “dwelling in the middle of potentials and pathways, suspending judgment with perpetual vigilance and curiosity” (p. 47).

We re-analyzed our texts to identify connections and commonalities across our stories, prioritizing emergent processes and the bodily intensities of affect, which ordinarily escape traditional modes of coding (MacClure, 2013; Stewart, 1996). This led us to break the text up into fragments that “refused to settle under codes or render up decisive meanings” (MacClure, 2013: 171) and thread them together anew (in a back-and-forth exchange of emails, conversations, and tracked-changes documents) in an effort to show how “the individual connects with the historic, societal, systemic” (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2023: 13) and to allow care to emerge in a variety of different ways.

The section below sets out this analysis and the “ongoing, adventurous, unguaranteed but generative, process of making sense in common” (Stengers, 2021: 88) we engaged in. It presents three qualities of care: care as binding, where care emerges as a growing competence that binds us to each other and to our work, fostering positive relations; care as contradictory, where care’s affective dynamics are seen to work on our bodies in complex ways, both resolving and reproducing neoliberal ideals; and care as transformative, where care brings to light and helps us resist the problematic norms that informed our academic work and offers us new and different ways of going on.

What makes me happy? What am I frightened of?

What follows is an account of planning and delivering the workshops, which seeks to surface the caring relations that we have each encountered (entered, maintained, lacked, longed for) in our (academic) lives. The account covers our initial discussions about the workshop in December 2021, through to its delivery in April and May 2022. The first planning meeting for the workshop took place on the same morning that Russia invaded Ukraine, following an exhausting 8-year hybrid war in the east of the country. We awoke that morning to reports of explosions in Kyiv. Kyiv, where Olga grew up, where she first fell in love, and where her teachers, her neighbors, and her friends still were—or were they? It was against this backdrop of uncertainty, destruction, and hope that our workshop unfolded.

The unsaid, the unspoken, the unspeakable—pushing back

Care as binding

An opportunity to seek funding for a doctoral workshop on research methods—particularly post-human and feminist approaches—had arisen, making Anna wonder what kind of workshop she could build, who she could work with, what they might say together, and how it might matter. As Anna reached out to Olga to work on a proposal together, the potential sparked by this shared work altered the trajectories of our lives, joining our bodies in a shared sense of enthusiasm and anticipation. As we wrote the proposal, our lives became more tightly woven together, threaded by countless emails and online meetings. The relations between affect and care in research methods took center stage in our joint work, pushing against a positivist idea of methods as uncomplicated tools for data gathering, and instead offering us a vision of method that is decentered, embodied, and careful. As we talked about how we wanted the workshop to unfold, we felt moved, by our own experiences of doing research and being in the field, to organize the workshop around an ethic of care. This involved not only thinking theoretically about care, but also fostering caring relations: toward ourselves, among each other, and with others. This has meant supporting each other in preparing workshop materials while each of us kept up with busy schedules and deadlines, all amid the unrelenting horrors of the war. It has also meant generating a “transgressive” pedagogic practice that would encourage our students’ self-actualization and “enhance their capacity to live fully and deeply” (hooks, 1994: 22) through sharing our own vulnerabilities as researchers, inviting workshop participants to reflect on theirs, and engaging in participative work with and alongside them. As the workshop planning progressed, the care emerging between us smoothed the harsher edges of our academic (and personal) lives, bringing with it a sense of hope and longing. In pursuit of a different academia—the kind of academia we wished to inhabit—we were moved to seek spaces where we could relate to one another and feel nourished (Gavin et al., 2023; Hurd and Singh, 2021).

I longed to make a difference to our collective and personal experience of academia in ways that might counter what academia was asking of me: a focus on ego and reputation, a solitary and supposedly disembodied pursuit of knowledge.

I wanted to give the workshop participants something they could use, tools to wield in their own academic lives, but I didn’t want to offer prescriptions, or to suggest the existence of an approach uniformly useful for every person and every task.

A sense of longing—for connection and community—propelled us, setting off new possibilities for action. As we worked on our self-described curriculum of careful research methods, we hoped to create possibilities for being that might bypass traditional masculinist modes of doing academic work and join with the feminist project of researching differently, a project that holds “vulnerability, exposure and failure” at its heart (Boncori, 2022: 7). We were pressed by the voices of those who came before us to push back against the boundaries imposed by conventional research and teaching methods, and to resist the relationships they impose on us and our students. Collectively fostering a community in which we could share our experiences as researchers and learn how we could mobilize around them to forge new ways of going on together felt exciting.

Olga’s own doctoral work still so prominent in her mind, she hoped to offer participants something she had longed for herself: a new way of being together, thinking in common, imagining what academia can give us, and what we can ask of it. The normal order of our work life was short-circuited as the resonant forces academia has traditionally tried so hard to delimit and keep apart—bodies, work, feelings, ideas, theories, future plans and visions, dreams—surged and rippled together.

I wanted to show the participants something my communities of friends, colleagues, and non-human things (the parks I walked in, the pigeons on my windowsill, the walls of my apartment, my kitchen utensils) taught me: that theory is not about mastery or exhaustive knowledge, but about curiosity, openness, and engagement; that you never get to the bottom of things, that there is only ever more connections to make and leads to follow; that all understandings are provisional; that we are responsible to and accountable for our location in the world and what we do with the resources we have, including our bodies and the knowledge(s) we make.

The workshop offered a space where we could draw on the embodied and affective modes of knowing (and being) often silenced by the neoliberal university (Gill, 2010; Pérezts, 2022). We experienced care as an impetus to engage in reparative work to live in our academic world “as well as possible” (Tronto and Fisher, 1990: 34). Care presented us with an opportunity to pursue new and different ways of doing academic work by fostering a space (the space of the workshop) where we, and others, could belong. Here, care emerged as a shared competence (Gherardi and Rodeschini, 2015) or a way of knowing (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) that bound us to each other, to the workshop, and to our academic work more broadly, opening up a collaborative way of working together that eschewed the individualist norms that prevail in the neoliberal university. The sense of excitement, hope, and collective vitality that care left in its wake lifted us up and fostered positive attachments (Fotaki et al., 2020). The binding quality of care invoked the kind of collegiality and a sense of belonging that caring spaces in academia are said to offer (Gavin et al., 2023; Nicholls et al., 2021). However, how care emerged in the micro-relations between us remained in excess of any concrete or neatly contained caring practices, which suggests a further layer of complexity to care’s unfolding.

Care as contradictory

The first of the three workshop sessions left elation and encouragement in its wake. The intensities and affects circulating between us generated a space where we felt revived, and it kept us going. Care, however, did not always smooth over us or unfold in straightforwardly positive ways (Hughes et al., 2007; Martin et al., 2015). It coursed along terse and fraught trajectories, generating what Anna experienced as pressure to enact a caring persona, to care for other—less “senior,” less experienced—early career researchers (ECRs), and to generate a “good experience” for them. She felt the tensions of enacting alternative—“supportive and caring”—practices that also level power hierarchies (Jones et al., 2020: 373) ripple through her body as waves of tiredness and worry. The care that had bound her to her colleagues and workshop participants also bound her ever more tightly to the neoliberal regime, blurring the boundaries between herself and her work (Gill, 2010; Mountz et al., 2015). Care in this instance materialized in Anna’s body as a mounting pressure to support others at the expense of self.

I was anxious to deliver on the funding promise. I assumed the role of the project lead, and now I was an ECR who was expected, throughout the workshop, to offer mentorship and support to other ECRs. It felt good to be able to “pay back” some of the support that I had received in my career, but I also felt pressure to look after my early career colleagues, to generate a “good” experience for them, to create a space where they could learn, and where I could learn, too. I felt responsible for others, for their experiences, for the success of the project, and for my own reputation (with peers and colleagues, but also the team).

Care, here, was experienced as a quicksand: Anna became both engulfed and consumed by it, convinced she had to prioritize others over herself. While she strove to facilitate a space of togetherness and collegiality (Gavin et al., 2023), Anna remained bound by anxieties around the successful delivery of the project—her existential fears magnified by a neoliberal ideal that pressed her to avoid feelings of vulnerability (Fotaki, 2023). Care worked on her body, drawing out the implicit individualism that was infiltrating her academic life (Ashcraft, 2017; Morrish, 2017; Morrish and Sauntson, 2013), both in the idea of “paying back” the support once received and in the expectation that her efforts might pay off on a personal level. This leaves us asking whether it is possible to engage in caring academic practices and acts of collegiality without the looming presence of self-gain or flirtations with climbing the academic ladder; whether it is possible not to care about the pressing demands of academic life and discourses of progression as an ECR trying to navigate her way through an academic career and find a place where she can belong.

Care also mobilized a sense of uncertainty and worry for Olga, though this worry took a different shape. Like Anna, Olga was an ECR, a postdoc, sharing her experiences with doctoral students while still exploring her academic identity herself. The format of the workshop was an unfamiliar terrain as she had few opportunities to teach material she really cared about in the past.

I felt like I was coming into my own as a researcher, finding my voice. Still, the position of a facilitator was new to me, I was uncertain of how to deliver my material, of what to say and how to say it to erode, instead of perpetuate, presumptions of expertise and mastery. I was also plain tired. I slept little. I sat in front of my computer a lot. I struggled to find words, to string together a coherent argument, to string together strings of coherent arguments … And of course there was also work: doing it, looking for it, worrying about it.

This worry about doing justice to the material and of living up to her ideas about how she wanted the workshop to unfold clashed with the fact that she had to carry on with the work she was contracted to do with her research group, and the duty she felt to her country that consumed her life out of hours. The material demands of care—for work, country, self, others—eroded Anna and Olga’s wellbeing as the demands of managing the workshop piled on top of day-to-day workload and life circumstances (Hurd and Singh, 2021). And yet it still felt thrilling, to be drawn together in a collaborative partnership, in an effort to create something new, something different, something that left us feeling rewarded by the caring relationalities that were being forged in the course of the workshop.

There was a sense of mutual support between the team as we built on one another’s ideas and willed one another on, emailing back and forth, commenting on one another’s slides. There was no competition between us, we were not trying to outwit one another. I felt happy in this out-of-hours worlding, this safe space of writing and connecting, being together, despite all else.

Care mobilized in the course of the workshop surfaced contradictory dynamics, refusing easy categorization as a salve for our tired bodies. On the one hand, it allowed us to participate in processes of shared and collectivized meaning-making (Dufty-Jones and Gibson, 2022; Núñez Casal, 2021) while navigating conflicting and overlapping forces: war, deadlines, conflict, institutional pressures. The work we did together felt rich and fulfilling; it provided us with what we’d been looking for in academia in terms of connection and community, and it enhanced our burgeoning friendship, which anchored our work together. Yet, at the same time, we experienced care as an added weight of expectation, a need to work harder to meet the targets we set ourselves—to meet our own expectations and the perceived expectations of others. In our time planning and running the workshop, care contradicted itself over and over.

Care as transformative

As we reflected on our experiences of care that emerged in and through the workshop, we noticed that care exposed and problematized the structural norms and demands that organized our (work) lives according to predetermined values—what Erin Manning (2016) calls “the major” (p. 1)—and our tendencies to abide by these norms despite longing for something different (Ashcraft, 2017; Probyn, 2016). In its swelling, care undermined these seemingly immutable power structures and created pockets of potential that disrupted the status quo. It seemed to “shift the field” (Manning, 2016: 6), to puncture the neoliberal structures in which UK academia is embedded (Ashcraft, 2017; Bowes-Catton et al., 2020; Morrish 2017), and to disrupt our habitual forms of acting and relating within it (Manning, 2016). This left us questioning the relationship between care and what Manning (2016) describes as the “minor gesture” (p. 1)—a mundane, innocuous happening, often overlooked amid the dominant flows of practice, that holds the potential to change the course of events, including our own and others’ (academic) lives. We began to consider whether and how care, with its transformative potential (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), might activate a more explicit change of direction (Fotaki et al., 2017; Massumi, 1995) and untether us from the expectations of a neoliberal ideal.

Can care be a minor gesture?

For Olga, the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine arrived initially as a threat to her country’s sovereignty but, also, as a threat to the meshwork of care she felt was gathering in the wake of her work with Anna. Text messages about rockets exploding steps away from the apartments where her friends lived and the school she went to landed like shrapnel in Olga’s inbox, throwing her entirely off course. Sitting in the first meeting with Anna and the rest of the team, she felt directionless, afraid, grasping for something to hold on to as her world seemed to unravel. Amid the grief and anger she was facing in her personal life, the workshop rooted her in a material reality that drew attention to what mattered to her—building connections and relationships and finding new modes of making knowledge alongside others.

Those first few months were awful, but could have been worse, if not for my colleagues at the time, both on my postdoc, and in the workshop—my heart beats faster when I think about them. They didn’t ask anything of me, for weeks, never rebuked me for not showing up to meetings, or for letting deadlines slip by. I remember realizing that for them I was not just the hours I was contracted to work, but a whole person, with a body and a beating heart, with a homeland, a family, a history, and a future to fight for. They knew: to work at all I had to be able to be my full self.

As it turns out, the caring relationalities that gathered in the wake of Olga’s work with Anna, and that had also enveloped the rest of her working life, were able to catch her and hold her together at a time of crisis. By acknowledging her grief, anger, and her sense of duty to her country, even at the expense of missing deadlines or not delivering on promised work, the relations that unfolded between Olga and her colleagues, including Anna, generated an alternative definition of value that anchored her. Although seemingly mundane and easy to overlook, these caring relationalities also worked against the pressures of the neoliberal university, where all that seemed to matter was whether Olga was producing the outputs she promised to deliver (Morrish and The Analogue University Writing Collective, 2017; Morrish and Sauntson, 2013). In this instance, care allayed Olga’s feeling that she had to abide by those demands if she were to remain in academia and opened up an alternative mode of being, which brought with it a sense that she could belong. Here, care worked to transform, from the inside, the dominant norms and practices of neoliberal university, undermining and replacing concerns about productivity and efficiency with those of connection and compassion.

Anna experienced a similar disruption to the dominant ways of doing academic labor as care emerged in the course of planning and running the workshop. Before we were set to deliver the final, in-person, session of the workshop, Anna, working late into the evening, received an email from another early career colleague. The email spoke of the tensions of life rubbing against work: caring responsibilities, doing “good” work, the pressure to perform, desire to achieve, to give one’s best, a sense of time run amok. The words resonated as they glowed on Anna’s laptop screen and threatened to unravel the emergent, and still precarious, caring relationalities that bound her to her colleagues. It would have been “normal” for Anna to contain her visceral recognition of her colleague’s trouble, and encourage her to press on regardless, but the caring relationalities emerging between us in our workshop worlding allowed her to be moved to look for a way to accommodate the competing pressures. In this moment, care not only illuminated an internalized work ethic that had potential to alienate Anna from others as she prioritized work over friends and family and neglected rest in favor of an overbearing commitment to being a “good,” “productive” academic, but also allowed Anna to resist the internal (and institutional) drive to press on with work.

I was counting from week 1 to 11 as the teaching semester unfolded and one deadline followed the next, an internalized institutional temporality, but this temporality did not correspond to the rhythm of the lives of those I was working with (for example, colleagues that did not teach on the same schedule as I did), or with the rhythms of the lives I joined with outside of academia, including my family and friends.

What became apparent was that institutional pressures that shaped our academic lives did not correspond to our lived experiences, nor the history we were living through as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolded over the weeks we prepared for and delivered the workshop. Reflecting back on that time, over a year later, we are struck by the many occasions that the caring relationalities, emerging over the course of the workshop, exposed the unhelpful neoliberal ideals that were seeping into our work practices. In these instances, care adopted the guise of a minor gesture, rupturing the habitual and taken-for-granted ways of being that we had assumed in our academic lives (Manning, 2016). In challenging these ways of going on at the micro level, in embodied moments of mutual engagement, care enabled us to situate our bodies differently in relation to the world and to open ourselves to the vulnerabilities, contradictions, and complexities of being academics (Meriläinen et al., 2022) that are often avoided within neoliberal institutions (Fotaki, 2023). Care thus created openings for alternative values to emerge and pressed us toward an alternative future (Fotaki et al., 2020, 2017; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017)—a more livable academia—in which teaching and research do not exclude our bodies, our hopes, desires, and concerns, but draw them in and allow them to be included and realized through our academic work.

What difference can I make?

Our collective account of our experiences of working together has explored the nuanced ways in which care materializes and is embodied in the micro-relations and mundane practices that constitute academic life. Emphasizing the affective dimension of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) has helped us to bridge the divide between the micro and the macro, connecting the personal with the systemic, and exploring our “ordinary” lived experiences as a “contact zone” among forces and potentialities, where multiple trajectories overlap and intersect (Stewart, 2007: 3; see also Ashcraft, 2017). Our reflective accounts illustrate the ways in which care can be understood as bodily capacity that is mobilized by affect, and reveal three qualities of care salient in academic contexts: binding, contradictory, and transformative. This nascent framework extends understanding of the ambiguous, and at times ambivalent, nature of care in academic settings and highlights how the impetus to care arises in complex circumstances that go beyond human agency.

We contend that care’s binding quality broadly confirms extant literature on care in the neoliberal university, connecting individuals to each other and to their work. We show that care can press us, as early career academics, to foster spaces that give room to and celebrate our differences, that are rooted in and allow us to build friendships or academic alliances, which in turn can offer a refuge and a means of resistance in the neoliberal university (Enslin and Hedge, 2019; Plotnikof and Utoft, 2022), as well as spaces where we can forge a collective scholarly identity (Power and Bergan, 2019). As Jaramillo et al. (2023) have shown, such modes of being and acting can give rise to a new kind of academicity that allows us to orient ourselves differently toward the structural norms of academia. We therefore concur with scholars who argue that care has the capacity to “reconfigure the academy in ways that resist the neoliberal present” (Boncori, 2022; Nicholls et al., 2021: 67). We have similarly found that care holds rich potential to press us toward pursuing our academic work differently and experimenting with writing and research practices that can help us reclaim our academic freedom(s) (Gilmore et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2020).

What if caring relations flow against dominant (and destructive) neoliberal structures?

However, though care and caring practices are increasingly seen as an antidote to neoliberal institutions, including the neoliberal university (Fotaki, 2023; The Care Collective, 2021 [2020]), our analysis suggests that they are certainly no panacea. Drawing out the affective dimension of care in our stories has shown care to be ambiguous and contradictory in its outcomes, both enabling and constraining our capacity to act in specific ways. At times, care has helped foster positive relations that improved our sense of belonging, and pressed us toward shared and collective ways of working that made our work feel rich and fulfilling. At others, it reinforced problematic norms associated with work intensification (Parker, 2021), causing us to put others (be they people, workshops, or papers) ahead of ourselves in ways that undermined our wellbeing. We therefore add to conversations that recognize that while caring practices can make organizations better workplaces (Fotaki et al., 2020), they are not unproblematic or without tensions (Hughes et al., 2007; Martin et al., 2015). Specifically, our emphasis on affect has helped us foreground the paradox of care that has otherwise been overlooked in more recent accounts of care in the neoliberal university, highlighting the fact that care can reverberate through our lives in unexpected ways or go awry, (re)producing exclusions and inequities of its own. Of course, we do not mean simply to suggest that care can be “bad” as well as “good”—this is not a normative judgment (Stewart, 2005). Rather, we aim to highlight that care can transform our lives in a multitude of ways and not just make things “better.”

What if the counter-flow of care could rupture neoliberal ideals in our academic work, labour and life?

To this end, we argue that care in academia goes beyond discrete and intentional practices, and challenge the logic underpinning much of the writing on care in this setting. Our analysis draws out the caring relationalities that are omnipresent yet “frequently made invisible” (Fotaki et al., 2020: 13, emphasis ours) or that just go unnoticed in the mundane flows of practice. We therefore bring to light the transformative potential of care as a “minor gesture” that can unmoor the normative standards that shape our work and press us toward new and different ways of living (Manning, 2016). We show how our bodies—and their capacity for care—are composed and configured through the various affects that emerge as we encounter human and non-human others (colleagues, emails, war news, technologies) in our everyday work practices, and how these encounters offer different potentials for action. Our emphasis on the affective dimension of care therefore reanimates its surging intensities (Fotaki et al., 2017; Manning, 2016; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010): care is not necessarily produced at will but is an emergent capacity (Gherardi and Rodeschini, 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) that arises from the specific circumstances in which we find ourselves. This makes care even harder to pin down and define, as its affects will ultimately chart their own course. It is down to us, as academic citizens, to be(come) open to care’s affective dimension and to follow where it might take us.

Could the human be just one force among many? Can we reverse the logic of caring?

Still(ing) an inclination, intentional or not, to return to the human

Our analysis begins to unpack the complexity of care as an affective, embodied, and political process that materializes in situated and context-specific ways (Fotaki, 2023). In particular, we bring to light three qualities of care (binding, contradictory, transformative), which, in turn, foreground the nuanced and at times paradoxical ways in which care manifests in academic settings. Focusing on these qualities of care helps us see that there is more than one way in which care can allow our lives to take shape and transform our experiences. To this end, there is scope to further explore various different qualities of care and how they emerge and play out in different settings. In particular, future research could further investigate the relationship between care and affect and consider how the different qualities of care unfold differently in different contexts and how they overlay and interact with one another. There is also scope to explore what other qualities care might take on in a variety of different settings, in academia (e.g. research practices, teaching, both formal and informal service work, and in professional service roles), in other organizational contexts shaped by neoliberalism (such as healthcare), and perhaps even in less obvious spaces (such as markets and high finance or creative and craft work).

How should it end?

Together, in relation to one another, as a collective, an assemblage of potentials, how can we make our world, our work, our lives more livable?

It has never been our intention, in writing this article, to offer prescriptive ways of doing academia “better” or being a “better” academic. Indeed, we have been encouraged by others’ efforts to make academia a more livable place—in our own institutions and further afield—where mutual support and care can emerge within and in spite of dominant neoliberal power structures. Writing about our own experiences in academia helped us as early career scholars to be more courageous in sitting with the trouble of academic life and seeking ways to reformulate unhelpful norms—despite our hesitation, uncertainty, and fear. In nearing the end of our writing, we feel a sense of possibility emerging: perhaps, if we remain attentive to the configurations of care in our work and in our lives more broadly, we might be able to loosen the ties that bind us to the ways of working that do not bring us fulfillment. At the same time, we recognize that we must remain vigilant to care’s complexity; care is not neutral and can have unintended effects as well as mask or perpetuate asymmetric power relations (Martin et al., 2015). To be open to care, therefore, requires “the prudence of the experimenter” (Manning, 2016: 7): a willingness to try, and fail, and try again. Of course, we do not expect that care or affect will offer a universal answer to the questions we ask in the beginning of the article. We do hope, however, that they can offer us tools with which to think, and to act.

The hard work begins now

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Associate Editor and anonymous reviewers for their supportive feedback and encouragement during the review process. We are also grateful to Sam Harvey, members of the Knoweldge and Practice research group at the University of St Andrews Business School, and participants of the EGOS2023 subtheme 37: Futures and Ethics of Care: Reorganizing Work, Labour Life for thier generous feedback on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No 771217.

ORCID iDs

Anna Brown

Olga Loza

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