C of Care

Research groups face increasingly larger waves in the sea of neo-liberalism that threatens our physical and work environment at the university (Busher & Fox, 2020; Nordbäck, Hakonen, & Tienari, 2022). Our study stemmed from the need to understand how we can maintain our balance and mental stability in our research group Elkarrikertuz in the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (Correa et al., 2010). We felt the need to combine two opposite but necessary situations while conducting research: loneliness, on the one hand, and academic interaction, on the other. People usually link university positions with research exclusively, leaving the chores of teaching and service in a secondary position. Doing research requires tranquility and solitude to reflect. On the other hand, we need interaction with the research group or with other interlocutors to question, refine or clarify our ideas. Jandric (2022) expresses this same idea eloquently when he states, “[a]cademic work is one of paradox and contradiction. We work with people, yet we spend most of our working hours on our own. We all smile into each other’s faces, yet these smiles often mask ruthless competition”. (p. 635)

In our article (Martínez-Arbelaiz et al., 2024) published in the journal The Qualitative Report, we investigated the feeling of loneliness, or rather, isolation, with respect to the scientific community and colleagues with who we share university offices. Taking Collaborative Autoethnography (CAE) as a methodological option, we embarked on a series of sessions to investigate our feelings of belonging or distance from our own research group. In these meetings, we try to answer the question of whether the research group could alleviate these feelings of isolation. Four participants from Elkarrikertuz research group at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU held a series of recorded meetings with the initial aim of delving into our feelings of academic isolation.

The first issue debated was whether we understood that our human group functioned as a community of practice or not. Simply because people relate and have common interests or participate in a joint activity, we cannot assume that a given set of people constitutes a community of practice. Eckert and McConnell-Ginnet (2007) warn us that a group of people does not necessarily have to function as a community of practice to share certain practices. The first basic ingredient is mutual engagement, by which the members of a group interact and thus, define the future tasks in which they will embark. In other words, a concrete shared activity that expands in time and space is necessary (Wenger, 1998). In addition to mutual commitment, the enterprise must be jointly negotiated, so that its members decide on goals and practices, thus determining where the community is going. Often, these drifts go against the impositions of the university or other scientific communities, so that relationships can be harmonious or conflictive between members. Finally, the most concrete part of communities of practice is the shared repertoire. This consists of the creation and use of linguistic formulas, routines, sensibilities, artifacts, tools, stories, styles, etc.

After agreeing that our research group showed traits of a community of practice, we went on to individually question how we felt within that community and whether we suffered from isolation (Belkhir et al., 2019). To do this, we wrote individual vignettes that we then shared in a later session. In the four vignettes, it was clear that each of us required different care within the community. We distilled the main ideas of the CAE exercise, relating the relevant features to the three areas previously identified in the social learning theory of communities of practice. Table 1 summarizes the result of contrasting Communities of Care with Communities of Practice:

Table 1

From Communities of Practice to Communities of Care

Features	Community of Practice actions	Community of Care actions
Mutual engagement	●      Holding meetings ●      Writing abstracts, projects, grants ●      Writing conference presentations, articles and book chapters	●      Similar involvement in all the tasks ●      Equal sharing of workload ●      Awareness and respect for family care ●      Sharing papers and ideas ●      Sharing and discussing relevant research ●      Gathering socially ●      Encouraging leisure time
Jointly negotiated enterprise	●      Paying attention to education at all levels ●      Developing a career in academia	●      Paying attention to all members’ physical and mental wellbeing, including project leaders when under deadline ●      Writing collaboratively ●      Avoiding competition ●      Setting reasonable deadlines
Shared repertoire	●      Group website design and maintenance ●      Group logo and pictures ●      Academic and in-group jargon ●      Inside (in-group) jokes	●      Creating a common body of knowledge (proposals, theories, methodologies, data, references, relevant readings) ●      Using CAE as a research method

Obviously, an isolated exercise of CAE is not going to change our ways of conducting research, but at least we have put on the table the need to alleviate the feeling of isolation. The way in which the members of the research groups relate to each other is an issue that should not be left to chance; the proposed model of care communities can be an alternative and a form of resistance to the growing dehumanization of academia.

References