Lucy Caton

In this paper, ‘storying otherwise’ (Haraway in Terranova, 2016), as a radical act of deliberate experimentation, is utilised to explore care and care-full writing practices in higher education. We think-with care and care-full writing through a posthumanist lens, drawing on an experimental writing session at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry 2024. Diffracting the stories that were created in the session, we employ e-zine making as an analysis method to open up different possibilities and new realities. In doing so, care is framed as a creative and sensorial act of connecting across time, prompting us to reconsider what care-full writing might involve. When care becomes an act of connecting with past/present/futures, we make different stories, rememberings and imaginations come to matter in writing. Enacting care creatively by partnering with our environments, materials, and other bodies through experimental and collaborative forms of writing allows care with others to be expressed, shared, explored, and valued differently. And, acknowledging the sensorial experience with/in writing, connecting to what is collectively felt around writing, opens the writing space up to shared experiences that expand collective capacities for engagement. We conclude with suggestions for deliberate and provocative writing spaces that allow those creating academic writing (including students) to engage with the entanglements of past/present/future, material and the sensorial, from which different writing emerges. In doing so, we argue that writing can be an important space for care-full practices in academia.  

In this article, we explore how quilted poetry as methodology, through the practice of collaborative writing, can help us to attune to and think with what is un/seen, un/heard, and un/spoken in our bio-digital ways of working, as a way of resisting normative, exploitative practices in the neoliberal academia. We are a group of academics with different journeys and localities, connected by a common interest in the effects of boundaries, the dynamics of power, and the desire to do things differently. Drawing on our daily mundane encounters with/in both virtual and physical spaces of academia, including Teams meetings, Outlook emails, Google documents, and Miro board collaborations, we write quilted poetry with fragments of precarious matter: silences, messages, rhythms, feelings, and materialities. We attend to the entanglement of our bodies and their enmeshment in technology and share how bringing relational, feminist theories and the bio-digital together has helped us to both materialise new patterns of relations and enact a more ethical approach to working in academia.