Creating care-full conditions is institutional work : research developers as campus earthworms

Over recent years, researchers have documented concerns about the low levels of wellbeing among university workers. These concerns have emerged in a context where neoliberalism has reshaped ideas of the university and academic work, and where academics themselves are implicated in cultures of audit, managerialism, and work intensification. We argue in this chapter that the creation of care-full conditions for academic work remains an important institutional responsibility. We examine the contribution of particular institutional workers to these debates: researcher developers. Taking a metaphorical approach, we suggest that researcher developers may be imagined as terrestrial worms, and institutional research cultures as the environment that researcher developers both enrich and depend upon. By sharing our own stories of generating research culture initiatives and tunnelling into disciplinary contexts, we hope to demonstrate how fellow researcher developers can think about the work they do as nurturing stronger university ecosystems for us all to inhabit