To care for self and others: a collaborative conversation

While the academic identity is often conceived of as a radically individualistic one, particularly in the arts and humanities, the authors of this chapter have discovered the benefits of long term collaboration across both creative practice and traditional academic research activity, which has provided them with a human point of reference. This chapter takes the form of a conversation. This is an extension of their established working method, which is explicitly feminist and grounded in the principles of non-hierarchical knowledge transfer and speculative enquiry in contemporary visual art and related fields. It discusses the necessity for care and an ethics of care in teaching, research and engagement with the world beyond academia. It rejects the increasingly dominant managerial model of ‘relationship efficiency,’ in favour of a non-instrumental approach that emphasises generosity and enjoyment in their academic lives. In both authors’ experience, this has not been an easy model to pursue and the benefits and challenges of this approach are teased out through conversation. Challenges that the authors have identified for their students have been revealed as equally applicable to them as academics and in this chapter they reflect on the lessons learned as working artists, as teachers, as researchers, and as human beings