Uncensored? Writing our resistance as an act of self-care

Abstract

The barriers to women’s career progression and negative experiences in academia are well documented. In this chapter, we offer a story compiled from a selection of our experiences as women academics in UK business schools. We use a “faction-based” narrative to engage with our writing experiences as an act of self-care, resistance, and a means to sustain our connections within a managerial, neoliberal, gendered, and racialised academy that does not usually seek to recognise or reward alternative forms of writing. This approach to collective reflection allows emotion to surface and otherwise hidden intersubjectivities and injustices to become visible whilst also protecting individual authors from specific scrutiny. In sharing our coping strategies, we offer this chapter as a way for our academic colleagues to engage with caring practices in writing for fun collaboration and to challenge the system that prioritises conforming to career trajectories that privilege white men.