Dwelling tenderly with our desires for research and the world: a collaborative and sensory methodology of hope

ABSTRACT

How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the ‘ideal’ academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity’s disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence – for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour.

KEYWORDS:

• Researcher identities
• research
• arts-based methods
• collective praxis

Writing and researching in the neoliberal university

We write as part of a larger collective – The Academic Postcards Collective – comprising 26 academic staff from a regional university in Queensland, Australia. This paper captures collective efforts over years (beginning before the COVID-19 pandemic, interrupted by the pandemic, and continuing now). It has been informed by others experimenting with ‘academic postcards’ (see Manathunga, Selkrig, Sadler, & Keamy, 2017; Sadler, Selkrig, & Manathunga, 2017; Selkrig, Manathunga, & Keamy, 2021), and by our conversations in larger groups and our smaller circle of five. Our paper is a reminder that our ways of imagining are not individual or single stories of progress or development (Machado de Oliveira, 2021). It offers a place from which to witness and honour the complexities of our entanglement as beings in an immanent world.

Our writing together has emerged from spaces of disruption, disconnection, and uncertainty. Like many academics around the world, we have been impacted by ongoing institutional and structural change. Across Australia, 40,000 academic, professional, and general university staff, suffered job losses during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic; 61% of these were women (Littleton & Stanford, 2021). Alongside job loss, the social contact restrictions to combat the spread of COVID-19 disrupted research activities globally, with 90% of academics working from home across 2020 (Leal Filho et al., 2021). Coping with structural changes, real and threatened job loss, and physical and social isolation has negatively impacted researchers and interrupted the collaborative nature of research (Leal Filho et al., 2021). Despite stalled research, loss of funding, increased teaching workloads, and institutional demands for instantaneous mastery of online pedagogies, there has been little relief from the relentless push to ‘publish or perish’. Emerging researchers, women academics, and other marginalised groups have been disproportionately impacted, resulting in increased stress, anxiety, and burnout (Suart, Neuman, & Truant, 2022).

Mirroring corporations, universities have become intensified and insatiable ‘quality control systems’ where ‘performance measurement, branding initiatives, marketing and communication units, strategy exercises, visionary leaders, hedging strategies and alliance building initiatives’ abound (Alvesson & Spicer, 2016, p. 31). Perhaps unsurprisingly, we seem to be at an alarming point in history where research is neither understood nor valued by society. Far from notions of research as the pursuit of truth free from economic or political interests (Henkel, 2007), modern research is fuelled by hyper-competition (Edwards & Roy, 2017), and the fetishisation of excellence (Moore, Neylon, Paul Eve, O’Donnell, & Pattinson, 2017). Constrictive prescriptions of research feed expectations for increased and monetised research outputs. Systems supposedly designed to assist academic activity increasingly control and direct research (Thomas, 2021).

The existential threats created by anthropocentric ways of living and working are also ever-present, and we are called upon daily to support university students experiencing the collapse of modernity in real and present ways. Our work together is a deliberate attempt to reclaim our natural state of human connection.

An arts-based exploration of showing up differently to academic work

The wider research project this paper connects to was inspired by the design and methodology described by Sadler and colleagues (2017) – an arts-based exploration into the nature of academic work as perceived by academics within universities. Arts-based research is a way to attend to ‘complex and often subtle interactions’, while providing ‘an image of those interactions in ways that make them noticeable’ and ‘through which we [can] deepen’ our ‘understanding of aspects of the world’ (Barone & Eisner, 2012, p. 3) – in this case our understandings of our academic work/world. Arts-based research offers ways to ‘forge micro-macro connections’, to explore ‘connections between our individual [work] lives and the larger contexts in which we live our [work] lives’ (Leavy, 2017, p. 9).

Our wider project [Academic Identities, Academic Work: An arts-based assemblage of knowledge, story, and experience (Ethics approval: A181110)] began when all academics in our School were invited to participate in a creative exploration of their academic work. Staff were invited to use visual and textual material to respond to exploratory prompts: ‘Research is … ’, ‘Teaching is … ’, ‘Community engagement is … ’. Staff were encouraged to connect with their sense of purpose and reflect on the project experience, using two additional prompts: ‘My guiding purpose/philosophy is … ’ and ‘My reflection on this project is … ’.

Twenty-six colleagues, including the five of us, engaged in this research inquiry. Using open-ended digital templates, each person developed a PowerPoint-generated postcard-style response to each prompt. Prompts were offered slowly over six months (and then repeated in a second offering post COVID-19 and the subsequent merging of two schools into one). Responses involved the selection of images (personal photos, created art, or copyright-compliant sourced images), and creation of an accompanying text of about 30 words. This placing of text and image side-by-side supported comparison and contrast, and invited the generation of new and unanticipated meanings (Leavy, 2015).

The postcards were later printed as sets for staff to hold and discuss during designated staff days (and in lunchrooms), and as large posters displayed during staff workshops and in staff areas at multi-campus locations. In this way, individual and collective reflection was encouraged beyond the original project group of 26. Opportunities for collaborative conversations and writing have been timetabled across several years as part of the school’s research agenda. These conversations continue still.

This paper is the first of a series of works from this wider project. Focusing on the ‘Research is … ’ postcards, we have also noticed alignment with, and drawn inspiration from, the artistic and pedagogical experiments of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) collective (GTDF, n.d.b). While the work of the GTDF extends significantly beyond ours in terms of grappling with the harms and practices of colonisation and imagining alternatives, we too feel the need to transition from unsustainable modern-colonial habits to more sustainable and compassionate ways of being. The work of the GTDF collective also reminds us that notwithstanding the harms we may suffer in the neoliberal university, we also need to grapple with our privilege and complicity as White women working in colonial institutions.

Undertaking our writing experiment has opened a space for conversations – and actions – about how we can show up with more humility, compassion, and responsibility/response-ability in our worlds. As our circle meets and writes together to bring this paper to life, we are attuning to a sensory understanding of what research does and is doing to us. We are noting the words we are using: emplaced, displaced, organic, rooted, relational. We are noting the processes we are using: processes of remembering, noticing, appreciating, offering, recognising, wondering, allowing, deepening, releasing, attuning, composting. We are reminded that research is a practice; it requires us to articulate, embody, and enact our values – and (for us) this is as (much more) important than the research outputs counted by the university.

Co-sensing and collaborative praxis

In terms of us, the five academic women writing and weaving the collective threads of this paper, we are seeking to engage in ‘co-sensing’ and ‘collaborative’ praxis (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 75) as a way of ‘unbinding neoliberal tethers of academia’ (Ghadery, Abdelkarim, & Sen, 2021). Our ‘political practice’ of co-sensing involves engaging with a range of invitations: invitations to ‘dethrone the ego’ (offering the gifts of our vulnerabilities, uncertainties, not-knowing, and failures); invitations to develop ‘discernment’ (‘making room for new forms of co-existence’ and ‘creativity’; letting go of ‘identification’ and ‘perfection’); invitations to ‘interrupt’ and ‘gradually disinvest’ from neoliberalism’s desires for accountability and control; and invitations to ‘entangle’ (to ‘tune in with the collective body, both human and non-human’ and feel our ‘entanglement with everything’) (GTDF, n.d.a).

We are novice researchers (some of us are just starting out) and experienced researchers (some of us are approaching retirement). Our academic identities seem always in formation no matter our years in the academy. While organisational and hierarchical dynamics persist to differentiate our relationships within the academy, each of our careers has been impacted by the structural inequalities contained in systemic patriarchy, and challenged by metrics, measures, and monetised ways of identifying worth.

Writing together, here, offers alternatives to a neoliberal gaze. It offers ‘collectivity as academic practice’ (Ghadery et al., 2021) and a place (protected by an ethics of care, see Black & Dwyer, 2021) where it is possible to explore the ‘ecologies of our hearts’ and our ‘lived experience’ of research (Evans, 2014, p. 57). We write both to advocate for such alternatives, and to engage in authentic expressions of reflexivity and creativity. We matter here regardless of our productivity, outputs, or experience. Here, we read and wonder together. We write without a burden ‘to prove our worth’ (Ghadery et al., 2021). With our writing and reflecting, we are seeking to grow and connect, to hold space for each other and for research, to listen and ponder anew – What is research? What could it/we be and become?

With an ethos of free engagement, combined with a commitment to each other, our writing together takes root and develops. We commit regular time to our processes each week, sometimes talking, sometimes writing, sometimes reading. We work on one shared file that braids our individual voices into a collective response. In this way, our writing emerges organically through connection and companionship, through a palimpsest-like interlacing of words, experiences, reading, and belonging. As described by Arnold and colleagues (2009) this approach is preferred to a solitary, pre-assigned direction where co-authors write sections in stand-alone ways.

With our slow, deep approaches, we are not just writing collectively, we are ‘relationship-making’ (Ghadery et al., 2021). We are valuing one another's contribution, as we share and cultivate not just words, but friendship, connection, time, and space. Following the isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns and numbed by neoliberalism’s ways of working, we are deliberately reactivating ‘exiled capacities and dispositions’ (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 56) and invoking ‘relationship-making as praxis and method’ (Ghadery et al., 2021). Valuing ‘relational rigour’ that is ‘rooted in trust, respect, and reciprocity’ (Stein et al., 2023, p. 143), we have been opening ourselves to possibilities and interrupting any individual desires for certainty or dominance. There is no jockeying for position here. Rather, we hold any individually composed words loosely and entrust the braiding process to bring about something real, rich, and regenerative. We (re)present our thoughts and voices (and second thoughts, and inner voices) to invite a glimpse into the layers of humanness, perspectives, revisions, and multiple selves that always exist but are often sanitised from academic texts. Our reflexive dialogue offers space to wonder and co-create, helping us see beyond the neoliberal views focused on capital, commodity, and cumulative growth (Hosseini & Gills, 2020).

Our writing offers a place to reimagine research as a complex ecological process that ebbs, flows, and entangles through the interactions, energies, and materials shared between us and the world. Like fire, it sputters and quiets in spaces for reflection (or in response to a good smothering), then at once flickers into life and conflagration because of an idea or a word carried on a gust of shared air. It bends and dances in response to feedback from our environment, yet is nourishing. We feed our fire not with demands, deadlines, and answers, but with questions, provocations, and ponderings. We tend the hearth together, enjoying its warmth as it illuminates new possibilities for enacting research outside of our academic caves.

It is unsurprising then, that our (re)searching here is bringing us back to ourselves, bringing a focus on us – the people who ‘again and again search for what matters, for what is useful and what is interesting’ (Rhedding-Jones, 2005, p. 18). Ultimately, (re)search is ‘what you and I do’ (Rhedding-Jones, 2005, p. 18).

Identities and questions we have lived and are living

We cannot do the work of research without being who we are, and ‘the meanings of our lives cannot be laid in a drawer until the work is over’ (Loch & Black, 2016, p. 108). Our postcards offer us points of connection, places to reflect on who we are, to share our stories, to ask questions of our own becoming.

As we revisit our postcards (samples and reflections follow), we (re)consider chosen images and the meanings we ascribed (then) to what ‘Research is … ’. We wonder about the formation of researcher identities, and the work of research/er. We wonder about our own researcher formation, our self-positioning, our own becoming. Our images and text invite a way of looking back and a way of looking inwards. Returning to our postcards, we witness changes in ourselves, and in our views about research. Looking back, we remember the lived experiences and context of our initial writing. Looking inwards, we discover shifts in thinking, the emergence of new perspectives. We have a sense of metamorphosis and evolution in terms of (un)knowing our (re)searcher selves and our conceptions of what research was, is, and might become. Viewing the postcard collection shows us how we influence our colleagues, and how we in turn are influenced. We recognise the power of what research does – the power of these processes in us and on us.

Are we researchers? What counts as research?

Ali reflects:

Researcher and anthropologist Ruth Behar (2022) talks about being a ‘vulnerable observer’. I feel this vulnerability as a researcher (Figure 1). This sensation is heightened because my kind of research doesn’t really ‘count’ in elitist metrics. There are critics who would call it ‘navel gazing’ and question whether it can be called ‘research’. The feedback from the Chair of the Promotions Committee (for instance) about my research contribution was ‘you have lots of publications, but it is not strong research’ This rejection evoked in me a sense of ‘shame’ and ‘being less’. Yet arts-based research matters. Am I a researcher or do I mourn my illusions?

What does it mean to be/become a researcher? Who decides what is ‘strong’ research? As we reflect on our experiences and our postcards, we recognise researcher identity formation often feels precarious. At what point do we/have we become researchers? It feels bold and unsettling to proclaim our arrival. Can we ‘look into the mirror and release the fear of disappointment, rejection, and abandonment’ (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 77)? Charon (2010) reminds us that identity formation is an ongoing process of development. Identities are the names we call ourselves; and what we call ourselves matters – for this guides what we do and how we do it. Will we dare? Will we name ourselves ‘researchers’ – ‘real’ ones, ‘proper’ ones?

Figure 1. Ali’s ‘Research is … ’ postcard, adapted for publication.

Erin reflects:

Beginning research during the pandemic inevitably coloured my understanding of research and researchers. Much of what I know about the work of ‘proper’ researchers has come from blurbs in staff notices or congratulatory emails for co-workers who have casually obtained million-dollar grants or (seemingly) effortlessly published their twentieth book. On rare occasions, I see them at the lunch table, looking serene, eating their salads, and clearly thinking more valuable thoughts than the ones darting through my scattered brain. This model of a researcher jars with ‘my reality’ of research – of articles read in snatched fragments of time between classes and meetings, of writing late at night, and spending too much time Googling words like ‘discourse’.

Our interactions at individual, group, organisational, and structural levels impact how we think about ourselves (Stern & Porr, 2017). The neoliberal academy so quickly frames and constrains the researcher identities and ways of being/becoming available to us. It seeks to dictate who (or if) we can become, as well as which research matters (Enslin & Hedge, 2019). Too few of us are ever exposed to this profound idea: ‘it is the researcher who decides what research is or might be’ (Rhedding-Jones, 2005, p. 18). We get to decide. We get to name ourselves. We want to ground ourselves in this hopeful possibility.

Ann reflects:

Am I a researcher? Can I really decide what research is or might be? This is a shocking statement for me. I have conducted and published research, but it is not an identity that sits easily with me. I can say ‘I am a teacher’ and feel its reality. But to say ‘I am a researcher’ feels heavy and pretentious. ‘Real’ researchers cure cancer or send rockets to the moon. My research explores human behaviour and is highly contextualised to specific cohorts, eluding any grand claims or universal truths. Through dwelling together, I now realise I allowed myself to be colonised by a belief that research is about revealing some disembodied objective truth, even while feeling a deeper truth that all experience matters.

Becoming a researcher can feel like sacrifice and struggle

Vicki reflects:

Research is … sacrifice.

I recall creating my postcard (Figure 2) made me feel vulnerable. It felt raw to share my truth, my experience of research as sacrifice. My intersecting and competing identities as mother, wife, doctoral student, and academic evolved throughout the research journey of completing a PhD and guided my decision making and actions within the spheres of both mothering and researching (Schriever, 2021). As Burrow and colleagues (2020) declare, ‘we can never be just one or the other but must constantly search out ways in which we can capitalise on the reality (wanted or not) that our “mother” identity impacts our “scholar” identity and vice versa’. (p. 4247)

For me, research looked like conducting interviews while nine months pregnant and on maternity leave (to utilise my ‘free time’ before my first son was born). It looked like bringing my newborn to campus for supervision meetings. Research looked like packing nappies, a change of clothes, journal articles, notebooks, and pens for each outing (to maximise those precious moments when my baby would be settled or sleeping, and I might progress my study). Research felt like a tremendous struggle as I cared for a toddler, was pregnant with my second son, and tried to write up my findings. Research felt like nursing my second-born son to sleep, snuggling him while I sat on my couch and read, drew diagrams, made notes, typed, and typed, and typed to advance my thesis. Research looked like sacrificing the final month of my maternity leave to work long hours on campus (including weekends) to complete my thesis.

Figure 2. Vicki’s ‘Research is … ’ postcard.

Becoming a researcher can feel lonely and confusing

Sandie and Erin reflect:

Research is … lonely, isolating, and confusing (Figure 3).

Thinking about research, doing research, and observing other ‘more experienced’ researchers can evoke in our researcher-selves a sense of loneliness, isolation, vulnerability, and confusion. Sometimes more experienced researchers forget what it is like to begin, forget it can take a while to feel like you fit, forget it can take time to find the door that offers a pathway or reveals possibilities. And even when we think we have found our way/a way, what ‘we think counts’ as research can be contested. What we believe is so valuable can be reduced, dismissed, and not valued at all by those using narrow research metrics. Our relationship with research feels so personal. We choose the topic, we choose the methods, we do the analysis. Nobody else knows our research like we do. Being a researcher is an embodied experience and we are actively engaged in trying to make sense of data, lives, and meaning. This can feel like a labyrinth, like an impossible tangle.

Figure 3. Sandie and Erin’s ‘Research is … ’ postcards, adapted for publication.

Becoming a researcher can feel like an infinite process

Rhedding-Jones (2005) reminds that change is a ‘crucial quality of research’ and ‘seen personally, research is about surviving the workplace and then transforming both it and yourself’ (p. 148). Apparent in our postcard reflections are the entangled relationships between researchers and research, the interweaving of life and work, the intimacies of becoming more academic/ourselves: Ali’s resilience and determination to use research as a storied and vulnerable way of leaving ‘landmarks’ for other researchers, her dogged belief in the value of her work (despite the views of the Promotion Committee Chair); Erin’s realities of ‘doing research’, and her discomfort and uncertainty about research and being a researcher; Ann’s reticence to call herself a researcher, and her gradual recognition she might be able to speak about herself and her research differently; Vicki’s experience of research being bound up in multiple identities, responsibilities, and roles, and intimately connected to her lived experiences of pregnancy and motherhood; and Sandie’s growing capacity to make space for the unknown, to stop fearing ambiguity, and find ‘comfort with the tangle’ and complexities of research.

Being a researcher is a constant complex evolution. Starr (2010) reminds that identity formation is a process of infinite interpretation, (re)interpretation of experiences, circumstances, and conditions. It is a process of recognising the interconnectedness of past and present, lived and living, of holding space for complexities, facing and addressing ‘uncertainty, ambiguity, and unknowability – both within ourselves and in the world at large’ (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 68). Researching in relationship with other researchers – like we are doing here in this paper and project – invites opportunities to ‘interrupt’ the ‘illusions and delusions’, and ‘promises and pleasures that modernity offers’ and opens us up ‘for the “possibilities of possibilities”; the sense that other forms of existence, not yet legible at this stage of the process, can indeed exist’ (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 72, 73). Dwelling together ‘informs our research by giving us skill in recognising and saying what matters to us’ (Loch & Black, 2016, p. 120).

Researchers dwelling tenderly together: taking up space for what matters (to us)

Our collective processes have been a catalyst for new interpretations, conceptions, and questions. Practically, the failure to conduct ‘proper’ or ‘strong’ research is risky and disadvantageous for academics (us). The ‘ideal academic’ (us?) performs like an efficient, disembodied machine, publishing only in top journals (Lund, 2012), seemingly marching forward without the need for rest, rations, or relationships (Manathunga, Black, & Davidow, 2022). Research in academia has been so commodified and fragmented it is difficult to go deep. Contemplation is hard won – sandwiched between competing responsibilities. Our noisy world of imperatives and outputs is full of distractions reminiscent of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Yet, we are neither disembodied nor machine, we are human – connected, contributing, learning, failing, growing, seeking, (re)searching. We are not spectators sitting politely on the sidelines of our lives or our research. We are not untouched and unmoved by our experiences. We are intertwined, embedded, thinking, composting, fermenting as people and as researchers (Machado de Oliveira, 2021). The impact of dwelling together is expanding our perceptions. The artistic practice of radical tenderness sees us feeling ‘our entanglement with everything, including the ugly, the broken, and the messed up’, and sees us relating beyond the academy’s desire for ‘purity’ and ‘perfection’ (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 76). Together, we are embracing the notion that we do have some agency in these matters, that we can ‘dance beyond the loop of identification and disidentification’ and ‘make space for the unknown and the unknowable, in ourselves and in others’ (pp. 76, 77). The confidence of Jeanette Rhedding-Jones (2005), and her adamance ‘it is the researcher who decides what research is or might be’ (p. 18) is settling into our bones and bodies.

Vicki reflects:

At the time of writing the postcard, my only experience with research was my PhD, which presents an off-kilter view of research as solitary and all consuming. Since then, I have experienced research in many ways. I have found trusted colleagues (who have become friends) with whom to research and write. Dwelling tenderly with others, my confidence as a researcher has grown. I have found courage to step outside the bounds of my original traditional conceptions of research to embrace autoethnographic and personal approaches to research. While there is still sacrifice – working before my children get up in the morning, and after they have gone to bed; conceptualising and drafting grant applications while at play centres; emailing research participants during swimming lessons – there are also opportunities to think and feel differently about research. Research has become collaboration, creativity, and a great privilege.

Dwelling together in radical tenderness connects us to desires to ‘de-activate colonial habits of being’ (GTDF, n.d.b). It loosens our attachments to our academic identities, to what the neoliberal university wants us to want. We are discovering ‘a whole bus of different creatures inside ourselves’ (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 77). We are sensing research involves a (sensory) act of being acutely aware and gentle; an act/ion of being-with (Heidegger, 2001). We are opening to the possibilities of research being softly emancipatory (Biesta, 2020) through its invitation to see, understand, and interpret the situations we exist within differently. Dwelling together has opened ‘a wider range of possibilities for action, based on a wider range of understandings’ (Biesta, 2020, p. 20), encouraging us to liberate ourselves from the ways power structures have sought to determine our worth, thoughts, and actions (Habermas, 1984).

Our processes invite us to consider much bigger questions: How can we live/work together differently in the face of unprecedented social, ecological, and economic global challenges?

Ann reflects:

I wrote my research postcard (Figure 4) when I was struggling to connect to the value of research. I was linking my thoughts about research to my thoughts about teaching – opening doors for students. Teaching has a constant flow and immediacy which I have struggled to find in research. Research too often feels like an isolated and isolating practice compared with the human connections teaching fosters.

However, embarking on this postcards project has opened my eyes to possibilities beyond the more traditional methodologies I am familiar with, and I am starting to understand how research can be as creative and connected a practice as teaching. Through involvement in this project and writing with this circle, I have been confronted with the truth that research is inquiry, and the inquiries that excite me are those that seek to promote connection, care, and a collective attempt to imagine and show up in the world differently.

I look at my image of the keys now and the metaphor jangles me. When I reviewed all the images people used in the postcards project, what struck me was how many images could be categorised as either of the ‘natural’ or the ‘human-made’ world. Although I contributed the latter, I was drawn to the images presenting research as connected to the natural world. This is the world I want to align with. I am excited and curious to explore the imagining of research as an ecological process that is complex, organic, entangled – and mysterious and richer because of these qualities.

This process has reconnected me to the exciting, challenging, and existentially important work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective [GTDF] (n.d.b). Re-examining my image of keys made me recall one of their pedagogical experiments on two contrasting social cartographies. One is the ‘House Modernity Built’ that draws on Lorde’s (2003) famous insight: ‘ … the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house … they will never enable us to bring about genuine change’. (p. 27)

Moreover, this house is now collapsing under the weight of social, political, ecological, and economic crises, the causes of which are built into the structure of the house itself. However, it is still hard for us to leave modernity’s shelter since it has affected/infected: ‘ … our reasoning, our sense of self and reality, our desires, and our perceived entitlements, impairing our capacity to feel, to hope, to relate, and to be and imagine differently’ (GTDF, 2018, p. 5)

My keys image now makes me reflect on how I have been both colonised by and a coloniser for modernity. I have sought the comfort of ‘autonomy, authority, certainty, control, protagonism, purity, popularity, superiority and validation’ (GTDF, n.d.b) in my academic work. In combination with a belief that ‘true’ or ‘proper’ research is about revealing some disembodied objective truth and prioritising outputs over process, I have separated myself from the world and paralysed myself into inaction with thoughts of ‘what’s the point?’. Our dwelling together in this project has helped me to realise the research I value – and that others value too! – is existential in nature, requiring me to take up my subject-ness in the social and natural world, and recognising my ‘entanglement with the earth, the cosmos and each other’. (GTDF, 2018, p. 5)

So, with thanks for the purpose it served, and the insights it granted, I want to compost my old postcard and reimagine research as something more embodied, organic, and regenerative. I draw inspiration from the GTDF’s (2018) preferred social cartography that uses the analogy of mycelium to highlight the network of connections available to us, to which we have reciprocal responsibilities to attend to for our collective flourishing. I’m so grateful to have been called by this work to show up differently.

Figure 4. Ann’s ‘Research is … ’ postcard'.

Showing up differently

Twenty-six academics responded to a call to create postcard-like artefacts with which to share their experiences of academia – gifting to one another insights into their guiding sense of purpose. In the hustle and bustle of academic lives, this large group formed and reformed, made plans, met online, masked up, locked down, stalled, made progress, detoured, picked up ideas, held authentic and honest conversations, engaged in further reflection, and collectively questioned what research is and does. These experiences have mattered.

Our writing together (in groups large and small) has emerged from a collective desire to explore and experience new ways of understanding ourselves as researchers and to envision more hopeful/different futures for higher education/ourselves/the world. Our reflections and our dwelling together have supported our capacity to reimagine research as more-than, to break it free from the confines of the neoliberal university. For the five of us, we have explored the formation of our identities as researchers, and remembered how embodied and emotional research is/can/must be. We have connected to our desires for collaborative caring practices, despite the competitive corporate messages about what ‘real’ research/ers should be and do.

Our relational and arts-based methodologies have provided a foundation for our sensory and temporal explorations of the nature of research. Our (and others’) postcards have captured embodied moments in time, provided a way of looking back, inward – and forward. They have invited us to recognise (value, and love) the changing faces of our researcher-selves.

Dwelling together with radical tenderness has been important. Our collective and communal writing has offered a sanctuary for imperfection and vulnerable observation, a space to breathe ideas to life, to see through one another’s eyes. Fresh perspectives and gentle companionship have lifted our spirits and gazes beyond the ruins of the modern university inviting us to (re)imagine something new. Just as mycelium thrives on the decomposition of the forest floor, our co-sensing has created opportunities for new growth, new connections, and new ways of thinking about and doing research even amid the turmoil of academic life, and the decay that defines the modern university.

We conclude with a reflection in verse. In this poem for two voices, the bolded speech represents the voice and neoliberal desires of the corporate university. The italicised speech represents a voice strengthening in recognition that we (and not the corporate university) get to decide what research is or might be, we get to name ourselves ‘researcher’. The researcher: the five us; the members of The Academic Postcard Collective; and, perhaps dear reader, you.

My research: a poem for two voices

‘My’ Research!

  ‘my’ research?

Strategically forged, regionally beneficial, and globally impactful.

  Intimately imagined, personally experienced, and deeply insightful.

PhDs as treasures in the fiscal chest.

  My PhD is a personal quest.

Transactional.

  Invaluable.

Conferences, seminars? Show me the profits!

  (Another weekend stuck in my office?)

Productive industry partnerships foster innovation and excellence.

  (Constantly questioning my own competence …)

Leverage.

  Courage!

Real-world relevance during unprecedented change

  What are the things that matter again?

Research that ‘makes an impact’.

   … on my loved ones, in fact.

A hypercompetitive, solitary endeavour.

  We resist! We dwell together!

Findings that break new ground.

  Me. The Researcher. That’s what I’ve found.

Acknowledgements

We extend our gratitude to The Academic Postcards Collective for their contribution, inspiration, and collaboration which grounds this research and our paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).