Researcher self‐care and caring in the research community

Craig Henry Jones,Rebecca Whittle

doi:10.1111/area.12703

Abstract

This paper seeks to begin a discussion on researcher self‐care in response to the state of contemporary academia, which sees increasing issues of academic stress and anxiety, and the growing use of facile metrics. Specifically, we wish to explore the potential a critical engagement with self‐care poses for ourselves as academics and the communities of which we are a part – what kinpaisby (2008) refers to as the “communiversity.” Our central argument is that self‐care may be regarded as a radical act that can push against the interests of the neoliberal university. We illustrate how researcher self‐care can be engaged as a reflexive process that operates to create and inform change within our communities through recognising ourselves as networked actors, rather than self‐contained individuals as the neoliberal ideology would have us believe. This paper is intended as an opening towards a much larger discussion regarding academia – of the communities, work environments, and “impacts” we wish to be a part of and how to begin working towards realising these.

Highlights

In many parts of the world there has been increasing discussion of the neoliberalisation of Higher Education ( HE) and its subsequent effects on the HE community, for both staff and students alike
We realised that, despite many differences in our circumstances (Craig is a PhD student from North Wales in his 20s and identifies strongly as a working-class academic, while Beccy is 15 years older and is a part-time lecturer and Mum to a six year-old), we were intimately involved in care work of various kinds within our communities
Inspired by Gibson-Graham’s work on community economies (2006), the ‘academic icebergs’ that we drew for ourselves were an experiment that we developed in order to illustrate the many activities undertaken by researchers which remain a crucial part of life within and beyond the academy, despite their not being acknowledged or valued by the neoliberal order

Summary

1.Introduction

In many parts of the world there has been increasing discussion of the neoliberalisation of Higher Education ( HE) and its subsequent effects on the HE community, for both staff and students alike (see, for example, Ball, 2012: Berg et al, 2016: Morrissey, 2013). Loveday discusses this issue in the context of staff employed on fixed term contracts, the increasing scrutiny of all staff’s research, teaching, and ‘output’ for various internal and external criteria may be regarded as an extension of this neuroliberal process1 The impact of these pressures and, in particular, how it feels for staff and students to labour under these conditions, has been extensively explored through a plethora of recent papers examining the often intensely difficult emotional geographies of contemporary academia (Askins and Blazek, 2017: Berg et al, 2016: Conradson, 2016: Loveday, 2018: Maclean, 2016: Morrissey, 2013: Parizeau et al, 2016: Simard-Gagnon, 2016: Whitney, 2019). With an explanation of how we came to be writing about this topic

Context

Practical examples of self-care

Care and the networked self

Care beyond Covid