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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.