A femin… manifesto: Academic ecologies of care and cure during a global health pandemic

Abstract

This article is a femin… manifesto for supporting and encouraging academic ecologies of care and cure: it is a collaborative assemblage created by six academics-laborers, white, native American, European, Caucasian, cisgender, neurodivergent, bisexual, gay, and… and… and…-who wrote these reflections during the pandemic events that affected their lives. The cultural artifact, the femin… manifesto, is organized around nine theses, each of which tries to highlight the multiplicity of cares and genders, the challenges, the productive vitality, and the enforced slowness experienced both during lockdown and after it. The paper uses different forms/styles-academic writing, pictures, poems, first-person narratives-which nurture the flow of the presentation of the nine theses. Each thesis ends with a call for action.The femin… manifesto is a performative text which, while opposing the constraints of the COVID-19 emergency, also sees the potential the event offers for caring and curingboth life and our academic lives. Femin… manifesto renders explicit the undecidability of cares and cures and is a call to unite with the aim of resisting the inequalities and vulnerabilities which COVID-19 has exacerbated.

Nomads, thresholds, and leaves: Queer entanglements within the AcademicConferenceMachine

“…Secondly, we propose our anti-drama-liturgy as a writing differently experiment which challenges traditional ways of understanding the writing process (Gilmore et al, 2019). Writing differently has been experimented in various fields (Benozzo et al, 2016;Boncori, 2022;Grey & Sinclair, 2006), from exploring ventriloquism as a method of inquiry (Yan et al, 2023) to feminist research (Benozzo et al, 2022;Handforth & Taylor, 2016), in the attempt to answer the question posed by Cixous (1976, p. 875): "Why don't you write? Write!."…”

Why Do We Desire and Fear Care: Toward developing a holistic political approach

“…While the idea of care as a radical political proposition has had limited take-up in organizational scholarship, this may be slowly changing (Benozzo et al, 2022; Branicki, 2020; Fotaki & Harding, 2017, chapter 6; Johansson & Wickström, 2022). Following Gilligan’s work, most organizational researchers define care as consideration for another person’s needs and interests (Lawrence & Maitlis, 2012; Liedtka, 1996) while cautioning that this may lead to the instrumentalization of care if employed to improve organizational efficiency.…”

‘Professor Moms’ & ‘Hidden Service’ in Pandemic Times: Students Report Women Faculty more Supportive & Accommodating amid U.S. COVID Crisis Onset

“…What’s more, in the burgeoning literature that tracks the amplification of such preexisting gendered/racialized burdens in the academic workplace, many analysts are finding that institutions’ expressed needs and corresponding expectations for such gendered, “hidden” caregiving labors have persisted and heightened amid the escalation of pandemic-associated troubles with recruitment, retention, academic performance/engagement, and mental health crises (particularly for students, but also for faculty and support staff; see Cate et al, 2022 ; Docka-Filipek & Stone, 2021 ; Górska et al, 2021 ; Plotnikof & Utoft, 2022 ). In many cases, institutionalized academic performance and evaluation metrics have failed to keep pace with measuring the caregiving labor that may well amount to the very ‘glue’ holding our institutions of higher learning together, particularly amid such ongoing, multifaceted crises (Benozzo et al, 2022 ; Branicki, 2020 ; Mickey et al, 2022 ; Özkazanç-Pan & Pullen, 2020 ; Pereira, 2021 ).…”