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Contribution short abstract

Exploring critical pedagogy and emotional labor, we discuss creating safer, inclusive spaces for sensitive topics in higher education. Reflecting on experiences with alternative teaching approaches, we consider their transformative potential and promote empathy, care, and accessibility.

Contribution long abstract

During the round table we want to reflect on our experiences teaching about mental health, intimacy, and sexualities in India and Germany, highlighting the challenges of navigating silences and taboos in academic settings. We, Annika and Sudarshan, draw on our collaborative research and teaching experiences, exploring how critical pedagogy can be used to create safer and trauma-informed spaces for discussing sensitive topics and ecourage personal engagement. Our courses in India and Germany aimed to empower students to think critically about the intersections of mental health, intimacy, and sexualities, while also acknowledging the power dynamics and social norms that shape these discussions. We examine how silence can be both a barrier and a facilitator of learning, and how educators possibly can work with silence to create more inclusive and empathetic environments. Through our (auto)ethnographic accounts, we reflect on the generative power of emotional labor involved in teaching and learning about sensitive topics, considering teaching as an embodied, sensory and affective experience. We will also touch upon the extra labor required to maintain these alternative pedagogical approaches, including the emotional and administrative work involved in building and sustaining inclusive and empathetic academic environments. By sharing our stories, we hope to raise important questions about the benefits and limitations of teaching practices that prioritize care, accessibility, and empathy. Can these approaches truly transform academic cultures, or do they risk burning out instructors and leaving our students vulnerable in systems that prioritize quantifiable outputs and seamless academic careers?

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Contribution short abstract

Building on our practice of a joint ethnography carried out together by a young anthropologist and an experienced activist, we argue for relational care as a central feature to make experimental research possible while facing the tensions of academic conventions of knowledge-production.

Contribution long abstract

The present contribution is based on a conjunct research project aimed at bringing together knowledges from inside and outside academia as equals. Through our methodological experiment, which we call joint ethnography, we have come together as a young anthropologist and an experienced activist, separated by an age gap of more than forty years, but united in a common research interest: to understand the strategies of persistence employed by self-organised spaces in and around Exarchia (Athens).

From the very start of our project, we have set out to work together on a base of co-responsibility at all stages, combining our different epistemological backgrounds while engaging with a geographical and cultural context to which none of us had any kind of personal relationship previous to fieldwork. As our method requires permanent dialogue with each other, relational work and mutual care have turned out to be a vital condition for its success. Joint ethnography and our personal lives have become more and more entangled as we have become friends beyond research.

At the same time, we have had to deal with the tensions that emerged from the need to work inside the very academic system whose conventions we were putting into question. All in all, we hope to contribute our grain of sand to opening up the structural constraints of academy that define whose knowledge is considered valuable in anthropological journals, conferences and classrooms.

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Contribution short abstract

Through co-constructed autoethnographies, this piece helps two young girls understand difficult, ambiguous experiences across intertwined roles: fieldwork partners, senior-junior peers, women companions, friends, co-strugglers, and open-relationship partners.

Contribution long abstract

The article uses co-constructed autoethnography to reconsider and reconstruct power, ethics, and care between two young Chinese student anthropologists. After two years of multi-phase and participatory group fieldwork in rural communities during their early research period, sharing the hope and responsibility of Chinese youth, they finally are co-authoring for the first time, creating a chance to confront and express painful and silenced experiences. First, the writing process reshapes the power relations between them. Co-constructed autoethnography allows them to speak openly about their fear of visible and invisible competition under demands for speed and novelty, and to change the situation by saying, “Yes, we both have our independent and equal spaces for writing.” Considering self vulnerability and broader context, this approach helps them understand difficult, ambiguous experiences across intertwined roles: fieldwork partners, senior-junior peers, women companions, friends, co-strugglers, and open-relationship partners. They express care in the process to revisit and reconstruct the past by saying, “Yes, you can write whatever you want,” bringing dialogue, healing, and a deepened bond. Moreover, co-constructed autoethnography itself is an ethical practice that asks how to write with care and responsibility. It requires both writers to engage with diverse narratives throughout their relationship and stories. Although co-authoring cannot fully resolve all ethical challenges, it enables them to take responsibility for co-producing knowledge, for the people they love intimately, and for themselves. This writing practice gives them the courage to say, “Yes, the future needs to be written together.”

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Contribution short abstract

At a time when academic care is romanticized and collegial collaboration viewed with suspicion, we argue for research collective as an ethical method. Drawing on the Images of Care Collective, we show how small-scale, open-ended scholarly collaboration keeps care critical, situated, and generative.

Contribution long abstract

Neoliberal academic regimes have hollowed out notions of fairness, neutrality, value, and scientific impact by translating them into metrics, protocols, and fetishized transparency. In this context, informal collaboration and academic friendship are often viewed with suspicion, haunted by accusations of nepotism or exclusion. Simultaneously, “care” has become an omnipresent yet rarely interrogated institutional ideal, frequently romanticized rather than practiced (Robbins, Kowalski, Buch 2023). By joining this roundtable, we align with the organizers' efforts to critically examine emergent forms of academic collaboration as ethical methods - ones that neither guarantee cohesion nor innocence, but make the negotiation of care visible, situated, and accountable. How far can such methods travel before they, too, risks fossilization?

Drawing on our experience as founders and coordinators of the Images of Care Collective, we argue for the recognition of research collectives as an emergent and ethically consequential way of doing anthropology - one that places care, in a critical, speculative, and non-idealized sense, at the center of collegial research practice. The collective emerged as a response to entrenched divisions of anthropological labour: care and visuality, our shared interests, are rarely taught or discussed together within institutional settings. Rather than relying on the resource-draining machinery of conference organization, we opted for a slower rhythm and less structured mode of conversation. We found that a small-scale, informal, and open-ended collective can create space in which epistemological, ethical, and personal tensions are not rushed toward resolution but instead attended to, stayed with, and rendered generative of new concepts.

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Contribution short abstract

Reflecting on our experiences of being part of moments of rupture and destabilization of both institutional mechanisms and feminist practice within academia and beyond, our contribution grapples with the promise and pitfalls of feminist praxis, using frameworks of collective care and ‘Complaint’.

Contribution long abstract

As part of the #MeToo movement, a list of sexual harassers in academia (LoSHA) was published online in October 2017. This resulted in an eruption of long-suppressed contestation within feminism in Indian academia along the fault lines of caste, implicating multiple forms of entrenched privilege. In April 2022, an action-research project engaging with at-risk queer and trans youth was abandoned by the feminist research organization which had initially approved the project and secured a grant to fund it, ostensibly because the project was too interventionist.

Reflecting on our experiences of and participation in these moments of rupture, we also examine an experience of an alternative pedagogical design which focused on reflective practice and peer learning, creating pockets of support, reflection and conflict, as a possible example of strong feminist pedagogy. Finally, we discuss a composite story of our shared experience of conducting research within academic institutions, demonstrating the impossibility of such endeavours without the crucial care-work of friends, family and others.

Our proposed contribution to the round-table analyzes these four stories, highlighting the ways institutional mechanisms and pedagogical structures often constrain feminists to reinforce structures of inequality. Seeking to survive within academia then becomes our act of feminism, leaving intact the illusion that our research output is our contribution towards feminist politics.

In our analysis, we juxtapose the ‘counter-institutional’ work of complaint that marks the complainant as a ‘killjoy’ making it harder to be heard, with the silent and invisible work of collective-care necessary for the smooth functioning of academia.