Care as Resistance within Educational Practice

Abstract

This chapter shares the learning of the authors who collaborated on an Arts and Culture University of Exeter Creative Fellowship in 2021–2022. The Creative Fellowship was itself a rupture, a process-driven placement with an open-ended approach, where artists and university staff were peers, and no fixed outcome was required. We held a common interest in care as resistance in contemporary workplaces, and as crucial to both learning and generating new ways of working through creative processes. This chapter is formed from edited extracts from two recorded conversations between the authors that took place towards the end of the Creative Fellowship. We reflected on the key moments, tensions, and insights. We present these as the learning we gained, which could usefully support others who seek to centre care, resist from within, or otherwise develop care-ful, ethical educational futures. We argue that vulnerability and discomfort are fundamental to creative processes, including learning, and care is required to hold these experiences productively. We conclude that the overemphasis in HE on individualised approaches to care—where staff and students are offered support such as apps to address experiences of stress, or where the burden of caring falls on individuals—fails to acknowledge its vital social and interpersonal dimensions and the responsibility of the institution towards sustainable ways of working for the community.

Introduction

Fig. 11.1

Image credit: River Jean Nash, 2022. ‘Bumper Sticker’. Funded by Arts & Culture, Exeter University

In summer 2021, in the long shadow cast by the Covid-19 pandemic, we three authors came together to work on the Arts and Culture University of Exeter Creative Fellowship (CF), to explore care and creativity in higher education. Arts and Culture is one of the University of Exeter’s sovereign strategies, championing creative activity across the four University of Exeter campuses, sited in Devon and Cornwall. The Arts and Culture team works with staff, students and creative practitioners to build creative confidence and promote the interdisciplinary work of the University. In this chapter we reflect on our experiences to draw out themes which we think could usefully inform others’ practice.

If care-ful, ethical educational futures are to responsively emerge, we must understand what this requires of those designing learning environments, educating students, and accrediting and assuring qualifications. University educators are often researchers or practitioners. They are also employees, colleagues, and learners themselves within organisations driven by competition which has resulted in learning and working cultures of ‘pedagogic frailty’ (Kinchin et al., 2016), or a lack of adaptive capacity. This is inconsistent with the need for ‘psychological availability’ and ‘psychological safety’ to ‘fully engage in creative efforts’ in the workplace (Stephens & Carmeli, 2015, p. 273). In the face of institutions which seek to address every educational challenge with a requirement for educators to ‘just do more and do it faster’ (Kinchin et al., 2016, p. 4), we explore care as a radical act of resistance and a mutually sustaining and expanding practice.

The CF saw one of the authors, creative practitioner River Jean Nash (River), engage in a five-week placement in collaboration with Sarah Dyer (Sarah D) and Kerry Deacon of the Exeter Education Incubator. The CF placements are run by Arts and Culture at the University of Exeter, led by Sarah Campbell (Sarah C), to open up new approaches and conversations between creative practitioners and their University hosts, while developing and enriching their creative practice. The Exeter Education Incubator is an initiative for supporting innovation in education practice across the university. It was set up and runs with the recognition that ‘encouraging pedagogical creativity requires more than just an emphasis upon the individual educator. Innovation also demands a focus on the interaction between peers, the networks of support, and the spaces in which these emerge’ (Winks et al., 2020, p. 133). As such, it is worth noting that creativity was at the heart of the approach, as well as an important aspect of the substantive focus of this project.

The authors wish to acknowledge Lewis Winks (Exeter Education Incubator), Naome Glanville, Anna Bunt, and Cerise Johnson Bird (Arts and Culture) for their additional input and support on the Creative Fellowship.

Ken Robinson (2001) provides an elegant definition of creativity: ‘imaginative processes with outcomes that are original and of value’ (p. 118) and goes on to include criticality as part of the definition: ‘creativity involves a dynamic interplay between generating ideas and making judgments about them’ (pp. 133–134). His framing neatly summarises two fundamental components of the creative process—divergent and convergent thinking (Design Council, 2023)—but does not tell the full story. When we look to a more detailed definition of creativity, such as Tepper and Kuhn’s (2011), characteristics arise that are deeply entwined with care and caring:

• ‘The ability to risk failure by taking initiative in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty;

• The ability to heed critical feedback to revise and improve an idea;

• A capacity to bring people, power, and resources together to implement novel ideas; and

• The expressive agility required to draw on multiple means (visual, oral, written, media-related) to communicate ideas to others.’ (p. 13)

These characteristics are underpinned by discomfort, vulnerability, collaboration, and community, all themes discussed in this chapter to explore the intersections of care and creativity.

For the purposes of this chapter, the Tepper and Kuhn definition is helpful for describing the complexities of creativity and its relationship with care, but it should also be held lightly. The definition is rooted in practice and the importance of doing and making. The four points above speak to abilities and capacities within individuals but it is their activation, through ‘taking initiative… heed[ing] feedback… improv[ing] an idea…’ that really count. Similarly, as authors, we are drawing on tacit understandings of creativity, developed through doing and making, with a collective knowledge that spans decades. The purpose of this chapter is not to argue terminology around creativity, but to bring each of our lived experiences and knowledge of creativity in practice to bear to reflect on its interrelationship with care. We are not writing from a position of a unified interpretation of creativity. Instead, we acknowledge and welcome the differences and nuances in our perspectives. To borrow from Richardson (2008), ‘… to have any chance of even beginning to understand complex systems we must approach them from many directions – we must take a pluralistic stance’ (p. 17).

We present the chapter as an edited transcript of recorded dialogues between the three authors towards the end of the CF. We do not directly describe the process of the CF but instead draw out our reflections and learning in the hope that they are interesting to others engaged in similar work. The conversation format models our commitment to alternative modes of communication, pushing against received forms of knowledge transfer and holding space for spontaneity, possibility, and inspiration as we spark off each other’s ideas. We begin by explaining why we came together in this project: why care? We then discuss our four themes: core and margins, vulnerability, comfort and discomfort, and finally the institution and the individual.

Why Care?

To borrow from Chap. 1, through the CF we were interested in resisting ‘traditional, linear, logic-based, verbally-centric educational models’, that centre learning in terms of quantifiable, measurable and marketable modes of neoliberalist education.

As Ball (2016) states, ‘market, management and performance’ have changed educational experience on all levels, and ‘management is altering social connections and power relations to less democratic and caring forms’ (paragraph 1). We wanted to think on what those collaborative, caring forms of education could be, on non-productive moments, and the lesser valued, but crucial components of learning and reflection. As Cameron (1963) put it, ‘in education not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts’. (p.13).

In this sense, the CF placement was a rupture. We all, at different times, felt that in our guts. It is the uneasy feeling as you realise you have yet to understand what each other needs from the project, nor sense how it will proceed; and that you need to negotiate in your not-yet-shared language. The focus that brought us together—care—is in itself a radical rupture for contemporary higher education (HE), despite an upswell in the language of caring and wellbeing during the pandemic. We mean instead to see care as a radical political act, care as a relationship and an interdependence, responsive to the person and situation as they are. In this way care offers ethics – normative claims about and acts of being in the world - which promote empathy, relationships, and embodiment.

In co-writing the brief for the CF, Sarah D and Sarah C considered care to be essential in creating spaces of innovation and creativity:

We are keen to explore the themes that we think are fundamental to enabling meaningful change in education practice: care and hospitality which support educators’ continuing professional development; connection with others and our values; and/or creativity which enables educators to think differently about their practice.

Following a competitive shortlisting and interview process, River was selected. River is a specialist artistic fabricator, joiner, carpenter, designer, artist and educator. At the time of their selection, they had been funded through an Arts Council England Develop Your Creative Practice grant to research The Workshop as a Site of Violence, which involved instrument making and generating a cathartic soundscape within the workshop. The questions that River was holding at the front of their mind in relation to the workshop felt relevant to the concerns of the Exeter Education Incubator in relation to the university, specifically:

What potential creative methodologies are there to explore when considering de-conditioning the industrial workshop, moving away from a site of social and capital violence toward the regenerative? How can creative approaches to technologies and social dynamics embed new cultures, particularly at a time of emerging digital technologies within the construction industry? What wider social implications could come about from embedding radical cultures of ritual and care in the workshop setting?

In transposing these questions to an HE context, we had the opportunity to consider how educators conceive of, receive, enact, and embody the various forms of care (Tronto, 1995) required to fuel creativity; and what are the interdependencies, if any, between care and creativity in establishing new approaches to learning.

Care: Cores and Margins

Our discussion began with an exploration of marginality and power structures in relation to care and creativity. We discussed how change can come about, and where care and creativity are positioned to drive that change.

Sarah C: When you have an established status quo—I’m thinking about current modes of learning or teaching—to my mind, the creativity comes in from the margins, supported by schemes such as Arts and Culture, and the Exeter Education Incubator, that sit across disciplines and departments. We don’t have the tidy discipline shape that structures most of how universities work, and that gives us freedom. There is also something about the perspective you have, when looking at it from the outside. You can look across themes as they come up, and that’s so helpful.

So do you have to be in that marginal space in order to be creative? I get the feeling that the enactment of care, and really valuing care, are coming from the margins. On the one hand, we have this huge desire to mainstream it, to make sure that it goes through everything. At the same time, there’s a real risk that the core, as soon as it’s something for everybody, then becomes co-opted, and loses the essence of what it’s trying to achieve. So, for either of you, is there an ambition to be in the core? Can the core ever be changed, or will the resistance always need to have that marginal advantage?

River: I feel in both centring care and an educational practice that really enhances criticality—and seeing creativity is linked to criticality—that process of viewing something that you’re looking to disrupt, alter, and change is a creative process. And part of the reason we’re talking about care is because it seems like there’s a scarcity of care in the workplace and in educational environments. But ultimately, I feel that when you integrate care—care and criticality, I guess I’m seeing them as running along in parallel to each other—you ultimately destroy the beast from the inside. So maybe there has to be a comfort with care as a disruptive, even destructive, creative act.

Paulo Freire (1972) talks about ‘the awakening of a critical consciousness’ (P. 36) such that once a learner becomes hyper-aware of the way in which they suffer within these workplaces, they then look to devolve the systems that they are oppressed within. In order to achieve that kind of change from within, from the core, we’re talking about those that are in positions of power, changing their position, such that the systems that they monopolise would fall. Sarah, you and I talked about that. You spoke about meritocracy, it would be the same idea, that it would require some people to wish to destroy the systems that favour their position, don’t you think? So here the issue is within whose hands can care even become potent or disruptive. Is care from the margins enough?

Sarah D: My response is that care has to be taken into the centre. It has to be, otherwise we’re thinking about care in opposition to other resources. At the moment care is the oil that makes some really creaky machines work; keeps organisations going at the expense of the people who do the caring. And so, I think that it’s really important to think about how care could be taken into the centre of organisations.

There’s a whole spectrum of what it might mean to be a caring organisation. It may not be politically radical. We can imagine an organisation that sees care as part of capitalist production; that says, well, actually, I see that care is required to deliver this service, and therefore resources are allocated to that caring. Therefore, I remunerate the people who are doing this care; those who make these other things possible in the institution, these people who give these students an amazingly creative, transformative education. It feels like this would make good business sense and would perhaps not be so exploitative of the people who do care work in organisations. It does pose questions about whether our understanding of care and exploitation in capitalism mean this is sustainable. I think you can move the dial. It’s not an either/or.

We were in agreement that there is a perceived scarcity of care in the contemporary workplace. While not exclusively the concern of HE employees, pressures such as contract precarity, oppressive workloads, shrinking pensions, the cost-of-living crisis, and adjusting to pandemic and post-pandemic working conditions were all seen to be taking their toll on the physical and mental health of staff (Davies & Preston, 2021). This combination of societal and organisational stressors has predominantly been met with institutional solutions that emphasise individualised efforts (such as yoga and apps) and has yet to recognise either the collective and communal necessity for care, or those individuals who are taking on de facto caring roles for their colleagues and students.

Considered in relation to marginality, informal care by staff members was seen as operating in the power hinterlands—relied upon as the oil of goodwill that kept the organisation functioning, but coming at substantial personal cost and inadequately acknowledged. In this context, vulnerability—usually considered an important prerequisite to creativity (Robbins, 2018)—was felt to be potentially unsafe as it risked overburdening individuals with a never-ending requirement to care more.

Criticality also came up in our discussion and is interesting to consider in relation to both care and creativity. Robust honesty and critical reflection, with one’s self and others, can be seen as acts of care that support greater self-awareness if handled constructively (Amaechi, 2021). In relation to creativity, criticality is vital to ideas-development, where testing and honing are means of progressing initial inspiration into finished work (Design Council, 2023). On a larger scale, the arts recognise marginality as a valuable space to foster criticality (hooks, 1992, p. 343); it is a well-established trope to refer to the arts as a ‘mirror on society’, a mode of reflecting back that, by its very nature, must exist outside the core.

Marginality is a strong vantage point to provide critique back into the status quo to drive change—for example, strike action by HE staff is coming from a place of marginality. The protestors sit outside senior leadership, and the action is critiquing the norms of remuneration. It is a space that promotes new thinking, making it a natural habitat for ruptions. As ideas become accepted and routinised in the core, new thinking springs afresh from the margins to challenge again, and the cycle is repeated (Mulgan et al., 2007). However, the margins are not solely occupied by progressive change-agents and creative agitators, they are also a form of power oubliette, where work perceived as low value—such as care—is relegated. Working from the margins can be a space of freedom (when people are liberated by that position), but it can also be a space of disempowerment (when people are kettled into that position).

Care: Vulnerability

River writes movingly on their project website about why they wanted initially to focus on social and professional constructs through the CF, and tapped into their own vulnerabilities as a means of circumventing these barriers in others to engage in a deeper and more personal form of dialogue.

I was interested to invite a space of vulnerability, or at least lack of being guarded and self-reliant, in order to counter the tendency toward the kind of professional performativity that is specifically born of masculinist and capitalist values. I believe professional performativity to be similar to the social construct of ‘gender performativity’ (Butler, 1999); that we both act, and is acted upon us.

There is a connection in my mind between this sense of being misaligned and dissociated professionally, disconnected from others, and my experience of gender dysphoria. As someone who has experienced the oftentimes excruciating vulnerability of gender transition and simultaneously what the ramifications of a willingness to be vulnerable has brought to my life—alignment, exploration, intrigue, surprise—I am curious to explore how socially constructed professional roles can also be deconstructed and unlearnt, and what surprises, if any, might emerge from that vulnerability?

Their interest was in transposing their experiences of vulnerability in art making and as a Trans Queer person into the culture of academia. Trans and Queer communities are often spaces of disruption, resistance and creativity based in aesthetics, but also in radical human ecologies. Due to the ‘conditions of extreme precarity’ and the need for ‘survival through strategies of collective care’, these communities can be hotbeds for avant-garde forms of ‘kinship and world making’ (Horak, 2018, p. 96).

Vulnerability is a familiar state of existence to Trans and Queer communities, both in terms of the personal and exposing experience of coming out, or disclosing in heteronormative society, and in the political vulnerabilities of being a marginal group susceptible to prejudice, discrimination, and even persecution. ‘The concept of vulnerability has become central to Trans activism in terms of both the political work of survival … and political organising that centres the experience and leadership of the most vulnerable’ (Horak, 2018, p. 95). Vulnerability in this sense is both a site for harm, and paradoxically a powerful political tool and site for new imaginaries. Halberstam and Halberstam (2011), undermines heteronormative definitions of success, to argue that the failure to live up to societal standards by Queer and Trans people can open up more creative ways of thinking and existing in the world. They point out that Queer and feminine success is always measured by male, heterosexual standards. The failure to live up to these standards, Halberstam argues, can offer unexpected pleasures such as freedom of expression and sexuality. This ‘project of failure’ (Halberstam & Halberstam, 2011) was a subject that River and Sarah C could recognise as welcomed in both the arts and Queer expression.

Sarah C: The art world loves being in this space of the unknowing, and failure, and knowing through doing. There’s real interest and curiosity in that space, because everyone’s trained in that way of working. It’s okay, when you’re surrounded by people going ‘look at all the great unknowing you’re doing’, it’s very different [in academia].

For Sarah C, the invitation inherent in the Creative Fellowship programme is one of playfulness and trying out new ideas. Deliberately, there is no expectation for a final, fully realised artwork or output. The intention is to alleviate the pressure to resolve an idea, and to embrace opening up one’s thinking as a form of respite and inspiration. The invitation is toward unknowing, process, and reconstituting ideas of success.

However, in applying the question of vulnerability to HE beyond the arts, we asked whether the conditions of employment and the culture of academia allowed for vulnerabilities also to be experienced positively. Questions that emerged were: do we need to make ourselves vulnerable? And is that a reasonable thing to require of people? This line of enquiry situated this interrogation into the broader consideration of the politics of vulnerability, and realities of the emotional landscape in neoliberalist and capitalist workspaces.

Sarah C: I was thinking about vulnerability - whether it’s practical, and what environments are suitable within the workplace, so that it will be acknowledged and rewarded through support. In a complex organisation like the university, you’ll have a lot of pockets where that happens, and you’ll have a lot of pockets where that doesn’t happen. And maybe it’s impossible to speak in any kind of absolutes about what an institution of 5000 people can ever achieve. It’s more (about) finding and creating the possibility to build a community. So what channels are available for staff to be in spaces where - should they seek it - that vulnerability is there, and is being met in an honest way?

There are certain needs that must be met around security too. I don’t quite mean safety, but you’ve got to be secure enough to be vulnerable in order for the creative process and learning to happen. For me, promoting care, and how universities can care as part of supporting a creative process, is about heightening people’s awareness of what vulnerability means and what role self-awareness can play.

Sarah D: Vulnerability is interesting. I did some training on nonviolent communication, and we were taught that, if you’re in a place where you’re going to impose how you are feeling on the conversation, then you need to not have the conversation… You don’t meet [another person’s] emotions and energies [in order to] put your own stuff on it. You need to meet it from a place of [enquiry]. That is one model. To be there for somebody is not to be vulnerable in that way. It’s to be ready to hold what comes at you from a place of care and concern.

What you need to care are boundaries. You need to first and foremost care for yourself, and if you’re not in that place where you are comfortable and grounded, you need to attend to that first. It’s interesting in that sense of professional ethics and professional identity but also work regimes.

Many questions arose; what resources are required to allow for vulnerability to feel safe, and a place of power and growth? When does vulnerability cause further harm to those already exhausted, or depleted in HE? As Alyson Cole (2016) states ‘all of us are vulnerable but some of us are more vulnerable than others’ (p. 260). Women and racialised communities are more frequently in positions of care, and at the same time Trans and Queer communities are far more vulnerable to harm within our society, due to victimising forms of power (Butler, 2016). So, is it reasonable to expect people within these identity positions to aspire to further vulnerabilities in educational settings? As Alyson Cole states in ‘amplifying the generative capacity’ of vulnerability, do we simultaneously run the risk of diluting perceptions of inequality? (Cendeac, 2022, pp. 9:21). We also need to be mindful that vulnerability is often associated with weakness from patriarchal positions, therefore could embracing vulnerability also be detrimental to job security, progress, value, respect in an industry that is largely still dominated by men? (Janjuha-Jivraj, 2019).

Care: Comfort and Discomfort

This section draws on our discussion about how discomfort plays out as part of the process of creativity and learning, that discomfort is central to both, and what requirements that makes of care. The aim is to identify similarities and differences and also to identify that the focus on care draws attention to the embodied and emotional, and highlights the power relations, complexity, and ambiguity (Mumford et al., 2020) of what is in the room.

Sarah D: I’m concerned that wrapping someone in cotton wool won’t necessarily further their learning, it won’t give them an opportunity to work creatively, that what you need to be creative has an element that can feel uncomfortable. I think it’s ultimately a caring act, if what you want to do is broaden somebody’s horizons. It might not feel that way whilst you’re transitioning through the learning process and having your worldviews shifted. How do we navigate that when the relationship is potentially one of provider [staff] and customer [student]? I feel that a lot of the graft of learning requires that discomfort.

River: Some of the most valuable learning happens from positions of discomfort. In terms of my own creative practice, often it’s my discomfort, it’s the things that I struggle with that end up becoming the fuel or the drive for creative expression.

I’ve come to understand over time that that discomfort is incredibly valuable, whereas many students may be entering the institution and don’t have any kind of value for that, or appreciation for what might come of being uncomfortable. And, therefore, pushing back immediately to any sense of discomfort within an institution, you know, like I’m paying for this, and I don’t expect to be unhappy or uncomfortable or in this space. What work is being done to explain the importance of safe discomfort in educational settings?

Sarah C: There are also tensions around it—when do you [invite discomfort]? When don’t you do it?

Sarah D: It’s a similar balance when you’re teaching as well, that people need to be uncomfortable, they need to embrace some level of ambiguity, they need to know that they don’t know. You need to take someone to a place where they know that they don’t know the answer, for them to want to learn what the answer is, but that’s really challenging. Particularly when you’ve got quite big classes or you’re not teaching them for very long, and half the student population are managing mental health issues (Abrams, 2022), it’s this really difficult thing to navigate.

Halberstam (2017) discusses the politics of discomfort in their article Trigger Happy, analysing the current trigger warning, and censorship debate within academia. Halberstam (2017) also draws attention to overly paternalistic approaches to education that shield students, their ability to critically analyse and attempt to understand their own reactions of shock or discomfort. They poignantly ask what effect this may have when a generation of students would prefer to opt for censorship in favour of safety, when they participate in a world outside of universities—what other liberties would an individual surrender in order to avoid experiences of discomfort?

The distinction between discomfort and harm, and discomfort and safety here is crucial, and the question of care again becomes so pertinent. Care-ful educational environments may provide the social conditions of creative, transformational learning. There is, of course, a responsibility of the institution and the staff to ensure that students are safe and well-resourced enough, to provide certainty of infrastructure, and (ideally) genuine concern for their mental and physical well-being and intellectual development. However, that is not to say that care always feels pleasurable, or the experience will always be comfortable. In fact, it may be that there is something amiss if the learning experience is without discomfort. As stated by bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress:

In reconceptualising engaged pedagogy I had to realise our purpose here isn’t really to feel good. Maybe we will enjoy certain classes, but it will usually be difficult. We have to learn how to appreciate difficulty too, as a take in intellectual development. Or accept that cosy, good, feeling may at times block the possibility of giving students space to feel that there is integrity to be found in grappling with difficult material. Not every moment in the classroom will bring immediate pleasure, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of joy. Nor does it deny the reality that learning can be painful. And sometimes it’s necessary to remind students and colleagues that pain and painful situations don’t necessarily translate into harm. We make that fundamental mistake all the time. Not all pain is harm, and not all pleasure is good. (hooks, 1992, p. 154)

Care: The Institution, and the Individual

In this final section we return to the positioning of care within the institution. Our discussion centres on whether caring individuals can be enough. We raised the issue of responsibility and duty of care, and what forms it takes between staff, between staff and students, and between staff and the institution. We circled around the question of whether an institution can care. Our conclusions reinforce the framing of care as a political act.

Sarah D: We were talking about co-counselling, and it made me think of the adult-to-adult communication. Universities are traditionally paternalistic organisations. That has changed. It is in tension with needing to sell their services, so it’s not moved into an adult-to-adult relationship, because that takes a lot of emotional maturity. It requires a lot of support for educators to communicate in those ways… It requires a real rewriting of the institution. So maybe some of what we’re talking about is actually the need for a different kind of conceptualisation of the relationship between universities and students.

Can you have adult-to-adult relationships between educators and students if you don’t have an adult-to-adult relationship between an educator and their head of department, or an educator and their vice-chancellor? Do we just need a real shift? Do you think the problem is that universities are individualising the idea of care when it can’t be? Or is that a distraction?

Sarah C: When thinking about that responsibility of care, the climate crisis comes to mind. If that’s pushed down to an individual level, and it’s [about] your recycling, then it removes the responsibility for big business and government and regulation to make the changes. There’s something about, you’re responsible for your own welfare. You need to find the hotline and do some yoga on the weekend, and then your unbearable workload will be fine. If there’s a problem around care, does it require an individualised response, which is get counselling, or does it need a collective response? Maybe there’s something wrong with how it’s being run?

River: I would agree with what you’ve said. My thinking was that individualising care just seems like an implausible option to me. It’s putting not just caring on the shoulders of individual students… but also putting the responsibility on the personal/tutor relationship, where it feels like another kind of individual burden of responsibility of care. I would worry about that outcome.

It makes me feel like these are responses to the aftermath of systemic problems, [triggering] the need for care and providing for someone when they’re in a state of distress, rather than creating the conditions under which the distress is less likely to occur. So, in that sense, I feel like it’s returning [the responsibility] too much to the individual, rather than the structure.

There must be a way of creating an educational system where you don’t leave people feeling so depleted or dispossessed or isolated. It is the model that creates it. There are very caring people within academia, there are incredibly caring people. And the issue isn’t with those people… I feel like the environment, the conditions, are such that they are not cultivating care, or a feeling of value.

When you were talking about individualising care, it made me think about decentralising care and [moving away from] the expectations of either a family unit, or just a single student-staff dynamic as provider of support.

Donna Haraway said, ‘make kin not babies’, and Sophie Lewis wrote about the abolition of the family unit. These things are not destructive acts towards our current relationships… but expectations of care exponentially extended. Inversely, that actually means that your personal sense of responsibility towards care, to any given person, is actually diminished … It’s also something I think about because as a Queer person, I don’t have expectations of a family unit in my life. I don’t have that expectation to biologically reproduce. If I was to be a parent, it’s likely in the context of being a foster parent. It means that my whole life… where I find that intimacy, or that tenderness, or that expectation that someone will care for me, is not formed through the idea of the family unit. It’s always been a much wider sense of community, and I’ve always been very focussed on friendship, and really tried to maintain my friendships. As I get older, my friends are going to be sustaining me.

Our discussion about care and community-building in the university also incorporated the importance of holding space for creativity. Sarah C and Sarah D spoke about their roles as providers of care and how their programmes support others in their own creativity.

Sarah C: I was also thinking about Tronto (1993) [writing about] being responsive to care, ‘care-receiving’ (p. 107), and that can be incredibly difficult. It’s not reciprocity, it’s not about you’ve done this for me, so I’ll do this for you. It’s just taking it, just receiving care. Through [programmes like] the Exeter Education Incubator, and what we try to do with Arts and Culture, these are spaces where you are receiving care. Somebody cares, someone’s listening, someone’s paying attention, someone values what you need. We’re creating space for that, and—to my mind—that can be very restorative.

Sarah D: Being part of the CF process has reinforced some of my own sense of what care can look like in an organisation. It includes things like smooth admin processes. It sounds stupid, but I think it’s so powerful, having a thought-through, smooth process where it’s like, I’ve been on this journey before with others. This is a guide. It might be different, it might not look like this for you, but here are some things to help you in this process.

This applies to teaching too. We want educators to be resourced enough to be able to create this creative education experience for students, and to be resourced enough to be responsive to students. So, they’re there, they’re holding space, but they’re also responding to that actual person going through that actual discomfort in its particularity at that time.

But then you want that care and creativity—connected again, through that educator—being resourced. I guess I see care as a resource, [so that] those educators are resourced enough to have bandwidth to be able to creatively respond to changes, to be future making in their educational practice. So, they’re not just doing more, doing it faster, that’s where the complete exhaustion comes from. The article on ‘pedagogic frailty’ (Kinchin et al., 2016) was written nearly ten years ago. They were saying there’s such pedagogic frailty in universities; it’s such a stressed system that any small thing is going to see it fall apart. Well, Covid was not a small thing, and for the most part, education didn’t fall apart. But it didn’t fall apart because of all of that effort and energy and adrenaline that everybody gave it. But we’re now at this point, where do we go? because people don’t have any more to give. Now what do we do?

Joan Tronto (2010) has written that for an institution to care there must be a focus on politics—dialogue about relations of power; particularity and plurality—an attentiveness to human activity as particular and an openness to other possible ways of doing things; and finally, purpose—awareness and discussion of the end of care. This framework provides us with possible points of leverage for change in the face of the tensions we discuss. Institutions don’t—can’t, perhaps—care, but we can create and maintain institutions with systems, roles, and relationships which address these elements. As we acknowledged in our discussions this would create ruptures in the current institution (Fig. 11.1).

Conclusion

In our discussions we have reflected on the forms of resistance that are both inevitably a creative as well as a caring act, the types of caring that in their non-traditional trajectory are creative and resistant, and how creativity and the arts are able to contribute toward ruptions in educational practice as proponents of risk, failure, unknowing, and discomfort.

If the desire is to build care-ful, ethical education futures, there must be institutional recognition that the foundations are collective and collaborative. As we have discussed, institutional barriers are built on individualised, anodyne, and marginalised framings of care, and an expectation of gratis goodwill on the part of those providing informal care for their colleagues and students. In addition, teaching risks becoming toothless as discomfort and vulnerability are viewed as undesirables, and the edges of the learning process are smoothed away to generate a frictionless consumer experience. In this space, care becomes a political act through the resistance and challenge it presents to the status quo.

Our discussions led us to conclude that care has both an incremental and radical capacity for ruptures. Care as radical is an idea that originates in the feminist Black rights movement, as Audre Lorde declared in A Burst of Light, ‘caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare’ (2017, p. 95). In economic and political systems that centre human dynamics in relation to free market economics, therefore, values of accumulation and productivity over personal and collective well-being, we see care, when centred in the dynamics of existence, as always the radical alternative. A fundamental change can occur within any individual educator or student when they choose to morally and ethically centre care. Incrementally, care can cause a radical effect in exactly the same way the neo-liberalist policy changes have transformed education. Care, decolonial thinking, and posthuman thought has the potential to make future educational environments as unrecognisable to the academics of tomorrow, as neoliberalism has made the educational environment unrecognisable to the academics of today.

Care, learning, and creativity are not synonymous. For us though, in undertaking this CF, working through their symbiosis has been incredibly productive and indeed nourishing. The time we made, despite our busy working lives, during the CF for open-ended conversations itself felt like an enactment of the themes we were exploring. Our discussions have drawn our attention to learning as embodied, relational, and always political. Discussing labour, exploitation, and organisations as part of these same conversations proved a really important context for exploring hopes and strategies for how we work to bring about a better future.