The day ‘care’ came up: agitations for care-full approaches to inspire flourishing academic lives

This paper presents vignettes of conversations around a politics of care between members of an all-women collective writing group at Western Sydney University, Australia. The collective, affectionately named ‘Super Friends’, focuses attention on the collective dimensions of writing as a form of care-full scholarship that seeks to disrupt an increasingly competitive and productionist university landscape underpinned by a masculinised ‘carelessness’ (Lynch 2010). Recognising that writing is relational and rejects traditions of solitude and competition, our collective creates discursive space-time for scholarship, supporting our identities as both teachers and learners. By sharing works in progress, we agitate for ethical and pedagogical approaches to writing and its support (Dufty-Jones & Gibson 2022). The vignettes presented were animated one morning after reading a member’s paper on infrastructures of care and teaching praxis. Our vignettes offer a means for interrogating questions we grappled with including: (1) how do we collectively orient towards care work for it to flourish and generate confidence and resilience in Early Career Academics (ECAs)?; (2) what is required to disrupt the co-opting of care practices into neoliberal objectives?; and, (3) how can care allow us to do academic labour differently? Our dialogue aims to provoke the imagining and enacting of alternative academic futures. We consider the multi-dimensional ways in which a collective and affective approach to scholarship leads to conditions that encourage care-full epistemological practices (Motta & Bennett 2018), and the emergence of places/spaces that render caring powerful.