Reducing the drag: creating v formations through slow scholarship and story

Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition (Scott-Maxwell, 1979). We are three women working across two Australian universities. Frustrated at the deadening, withering nature and containment of the neoliberal university, and inspired by the wisdom of slow scholarship and the cooperative reciprocity inherent in the V formations adopted by groups of flying birds to boost vital energy, our chapter encapsulates our efforts to ‘care for self and others’ and ‘count what others don’t’. It follows our attempts to resist the insidious, diminishing drag of metric-based audits and managerialism. Having joyfully discovered we have ‘outgrown’ narrow academic containers of measurement, comparison, and productivity, we are responding to our longing to connect and to ‘be’ differently in academia. Our resistance is characterised by efforts to listen and converse in meaningful ways, ways that speak our lives into the academy. For over a year we have been initiating conversations with a trusted group of colleagues and acquiring responsive, personal and aesthetic ways to address and reconcile our personal/professional lives. Inviting the reader into our deliberate storying and de-storying of our lived experience whilst practicing a politics of care, collaboration and authenticity, we are subverting what it means to be productive and accountable and what it means to be an academic. And in so doing we are seeding new and fruitful ways of working. We are unearthing our individual and collective voice, and creating and expanding safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal disclosure and meaning-making

Collaborative writing ‘betwixt and between’ sits jaggedly against traditional regimes of authorship

In the context of academic financialisation where writing is ‘repurposed’ as an outcome designed to maximise financial profit, and to resist the pressure to be ‘careless’ (Lynch 2010) ‘ideal functionaries’ (Pereira 2012), we – a group of five women academics – come together to share stories of our accrued wisdom about living in the afternoon of our lives. We also share our creative writing and theorising about collaborative writing processes in papers, chapters, and conference presentations. As we do so, we encounter a conflict between our practice of inter-personal collaboration and the traditions and pressures of academic authorship where we are expected to publish in a vertical hierarchy of (first author, nameless et al.s, date). We therefore reflect on the paradoxes and tensions involved in collaborative writing within the academy. In particular, we explore how co-operative practice congruent with the philosophical framework of new materialism sits jaggedly against an academic culture of individualism, surveillance, audit, and the pressure for academics to (be seen to) publish. We offer no conclusion or easy resolution, but like Socratic ‘gadflies’ we seek to trouble the structural impediments to collaborative writing in the academy

Strategies for Resisting Sexism in the Academy: Higher Education, Gender, and Intersectionality

This book harnesses the expertise of women academics who have constructed innovative approaches to challenging existing sexual disadvantage in the academy. Countering the prevailing postfeminist discourse, the contributors to this volume argue that sexism needs to be named in order to be challenged and resisted. Exploring a complex, intersectional and diverse arrangement of resistance strategies, the contributors outline useful tools to resist, subvert and identify sexist policy and practice that can be deployed by organisations and collectives as well as individuals. The volume analyses pedagogical, curriculum and research approaches as well as case studies which expose, satirise and subvert sexism in the academy: instead, embodied and slow scholarship as political tools of resistance are introduced. A call for action against the propagation of sexism and gender disadvantage in the academy, this important book will appeal to students and scholars of sexism in higher education as well as all those committed to working towards gender e/quality.https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/englishfacbooks/1017/thumbnail.jp

Finding connectedness, finding belonging, finding our voice: contemplating creative and connected futures through storytelling and narrative.

Connected to the themes ‘Creative Futures’ and ‘Sustainable Futures’, our aims are exploratory and experimental. Using our small group’s experiences, we consider how social and creative connectivity can be established through storytelling and narrative. We speak for a group of seven middle-aged women academics living and working in regional communities and regional universities – an almost silent group whose voices are rarely represented. We consider the positive impact narrative and storytelling can have individually and collectively on wellbeing and energy, and its capacity to give life to shared scholarship. For over a year we have been overcoming distance, initiating conversations and building relationships, and acquiring ways to communicate, connect, and engage in deep scholarship. These meaningful processes have been sustained and supported by video-conferencing and emails, storytelling and memoir writing, poetry and art-making, and research collaboration. Individually and collectively we have experienced the positive impact of narrative and storytelling, discovering our personal and collective voices as safe spaces for storying and connecting have been created and expanded. Over time, formerly concealed and embodied stories have become public and communal, sometimes as quiet whispers, sometimes as forceful outpourings of emotion, sometimes as everyday meandering in the ordinariness of our middle-aged lives. In this presentation we contemplate our becoming into our stories, and how our collaboration and connection is changing the way we want to work and be in both workplace and community. We consider the relevance of this as women academics working in universities in the Regional Universities Network – universities with commitments to playing a transformative strength and identity building role in their regions. We extend to others an invitation to consider the value of creating nurturing, responsive, reciprocal spaces that support connections and collaborations across distances and regions. And, we invite a shared exploration of the power of aesthetic tools and creative activities for transforming individuals, communities, and the work of academics in regional universities

Slow scholarship and wellbeing: humanising the academic machine

Is ‘slow scholarship’ feasible in the competitive context of academic careers wheremanagerialism, self-promotion, and tick-the-box measures of achievement have become determiners of academic success? This paper interweaves visual, auditory and performative narratives to represent an emerging alternative to the existing paradigm as seven female academics and educators gradually find ways to disrupt and cross the boundaries of their tenuous roles as educators in four regional Australian universities. Over one year, they create a space where new thinking, confidence and wellbeing emerges. They negotiate an ethics of praxis for writing and publishing: this disrupts the self-seeking habitus of academic life, re-constitutes academic writing as an emergent space for speaking back to received values about what counts as research writing; and reconstitutes and acknowledges the intrinsic value of each individual life as a contributing element of the combined strength and energy of the group. These practices are then adopted by a second group of academics who work alongside the first group. This creates a counterpoint to the market-driven rhythm of universities which diminishes academics by demanding that they compete for an increasingly shallow pool of funds. By interweaving words, images, sound and performance over a series of publications the authors demonstrate the power of arts-informed storytelling to disrupt the habitus and expectations of academic life. More important than the publications generated in that emergent space is the evidence that ‘slow scholarship’ practiced within a cooperative group where listening is as important as talking can generate a powerful ethic of care for self and other. In turn this re-humanising of the research space can re-vivify personal and professional wellbeing across multiple dimensions by creating new personal, social and academic frameworks for ‘being an academic’

Telling lives: women, stories and healing

Over a year seven women agree to think about, write, and share narratives of living, surviving and being in the afternoon of their lives. During this year we use forms of communication that embrace poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. What emerges during the deep and vulnerable personal writing, and the intimate and collective feedback and sharing of stories during writing workshops, is both empowering and healing. From sharing, reading and talking 'about' our writing, we find self-empowerment, affirmation, validation, support, encouragement and dignity and (re)discover both our unique and shared journeys as women. In making our stories public, stories we have not revealed before, storiesof lives we didn’t choose or imagine but of lives we are given and are living through, we listen, hear, recognise and acknowledge experience – our own and others’. As we listen and hear we connect to ourselves and to the diversity, uniqueness, strength and depth of other women. And in so doing we find connection, healing and renewed courage to live meaningfully and wholly

Rupturing the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourse through collective memoir

The authors, seven women–writers–performers–artists–academics, have been working collectively for a year, storying, de-storying and re-storying the experience of our lives. The authors write to “taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect” (Nin, 1976), to uncover and learn ourselves through writing (Richardson, 1997), to take the “risky” steps of talking to each other about our inner lives (Palmer, 1998). Cognisant of the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourses, in form and content, and heavily confined by neoliberal expectations to count and be counted, we write and express the stories of lives the authors did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. Our expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development. The paper aims to discuss these issues

Risky discourses: promiscuously storying women's lives

PANEL PRESENTATION ABSTRACT We, seven women writers performers artists academics, have been working collectively for a year, storying, de-storying and re-storying the experience of our lives.   We write to ‘taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect’ (Nin, 1976), to uncover and learn ourselves through writing (Richardson, 2000), to take the ‘risky’ steps of talking to each other about our inner lives (Palmer, 1998).   Cognisant of the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourses, in form and content, and heavily confined by neoliberal expectations to count and be counted, we write and express the stories of lives we didn’t choose or imagine, but the lives we are given and live through. Our expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. For our panel discussion we come together from different physical locations and different spaces in the field of education to make public our stories and their promiscuous forms (Childers et al, 2013). We contemplate the conscious de-disciplining (Richardson, 2000) of our practice which we express using performance, tableaux, and voice to further extend women’s imagistic ways of knowing and communicating (Langer, 1942). References: Nin, A. (1976). In favor of the sensitive man, and other essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Childers, S., Rhee, J., and Daza, S.L. (2013). Promiscuous (use of) feminist methodologies: The dirty theory and messy practice of educational research beyond gender. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26 (5), 507 – 523. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2013.786849 Langer, S. K. (1942). Philosophy in a new key. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Palmer, P.J. (1998) The courage to teach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed. pp. 923 – 948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage