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Cultivating Collaborative Communities

Gayle Letherby, Beth Michael-Fox, Tamarin Norwood - Chaired Kate Woodthorpe

Cultivating Collaborative Communities

Cultivating Collaborative Communities: Gayle Letherby, Beth Michael-Fox, Tamarin Norwood - Chaired Kate Woodthorpe


Cultivating Collaborative Communities

Since the 1980’s the rapid global neo-liberalisation (the marketisation) of higher education has seen quantification colonising every part of university practice, (re)creating normalised and ideological ways of thinking, doing and being. Internal and external measures of ‘quality assurance’ are the dominant regulatory tools in the management of higher education and ‘efficiency’ savings have led to automated processes in the daily work of university employees and our teaching and research activities and relationships are measured in metrics. This denies the embodied, emotional, political experience of our daily working experiences.

With reference to concepts such as care-ful as opposed to care-less practices (e.g. Rogers 2017), slow scholarship (e.g. Dionne 2021) and intimate professionalism (e.g. Kelly 2015), and drawing on examples from our own individual and joint working practices we (the panel members) reflect on alternative, collaborative ways of working, learning and being in higher education; on cultivating (and maintaining) collaborative communities. In the session there will be plenty of time for discussion and sharing of challenges and strategies for working in positive collaborative communities, so please come along with stories and concerns to share.

Discussions in this panel include:

  • Implementing the compassionate communities approach within the classroom: The promises and perils of discussing death with students. - Samantha Teichman
  • The Grief Experience of Ukrainian and Palestinian Immigrants in Canada - Zohreh Bayatrizi
  • Fading names on precarious crosses: death and memory of (in)visible migrants. - Michelangelo Giampaoli
  • There was no otherwise': Narratives of The Space Between for Nine Kenyan Children - Callie Daniels-Howell