By Carolyn Cooke, Petra Vackova, Emily Dowdeswell, Lucy Caton and Donata Puntil
The Special Issue on Liberating Learning in Higher Education was an opportunity for us to challenge the culture of undercare in marketized academia through an act of deliberate experimentation with collaborative writing. To counteract the neoliberal climate in which writing has become a source of burnout and anxiety, our biodigital writing experiments forefront ‘storying otherwise’ as an important act of care and of care-full writing in academia. Drawing on feminist and posthuman philosophies, we embrace the sensorial, affective and nomadic aspects of inquiring, questioning, sharing, and responding in writing to highlight new patterns of relations around writing and new speculative openings that may help us rethink what care, caring and care-full ways of writing in higher education might possibly involve. We conceptualize our writing as playful co-mingling with our environments, our bodies and our (hi)stories which creates a rhizomatic network of entangled stories that span across varied boundaries. In the article we discuss an online writing session, we developed for the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry in 2024 in particular. During this conference we created an online space to write together in a DropboxPaper with conference participants as well as those whose differently layered circumstances of precarity prevented them from attending the conference. Together we then explored tensions between knowledge production, open discussion, accessibility, ethics, and care in academia through writing. In the paper, we also discuss how we engaged e-zine writing as a diffractive methodology that allowed us to stay attentive to and creative with the stories we have written with others during the conference in affirmative ways. Connecting across time, space and place through creative, sensorial collaborative writing allowed us to develop a more care-full writing practice that we hope will inspire and encourage both students and academics to experiment and write otherwise in higher education.