Reducing the drag: creating v formations through slow scholarship and story

Reducing the drag: creating v formations through slow scholarship and story

Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition (Scott-Maxwell, 1979). We are three women working across two Australian universities. Frustrated at the deadening, withering nature and containment of the neoliberal university, and inspired by the wisdom of slow scholarship and the cooperative reciprocity inherent in the V formations adopted by groups of flying birds to boost vital energy, our chapter encapsulates our efforts to ‘care for self and others’ and ‘count what others don’t’. It follows our attempts to resist the insidious, diminishing drag of metric-based audits and managerialism. Having joyfully discovered we have ‘outgrown’ narrow academic containers of measurement, comparison, and productivity, we are responding to our longing to connect and to ‘be’ differently in academia. Our resistance is characterised by efforts to listen and converse in meaningful ways, ways that speak our lives into the academy. For over a year we have been initiating conversations with a trusted group of colleagues and acquiring responsive, personal and aesthetic ways to address and reconcile our personal/professional lives. Inviting the reader into our deliberate storying and de-storying of our lived experience whilst practicing a politics of care, collaboration and authenticity, we are subverting what it means to be productive and accountable and what it means to be an academic. And in so doing we are seeding new and fruitful ways of working. We are unearthing our individual and collective voice, and creating and expanding safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal disclosure and meaning-making.

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