Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group

Abstract

Many university scholars, including the authors of this article, acknowledge that they feel like they are riding an emotional roller coaster with academic success, as well as many project failures. Except for our PhD thesis, many of us complete our research tasks in relatively established research groups. However, little research has examined the potential these groups might have to mitigate feelings of academic isolation. To fill in this gap, we designed two methodological steps. First, we adopted the Woolfian metaphor of a room of our own, where we composed individual vignettes regarding our feelings of isolation. We read each other's texts and then, in a second step, moved to a “living room” to negotiate our emerging ideas, echoing a Collaborative Autoethnography. Two full professors and two early-career researchers reflected on and talked about their feelings of academic isolation, from their personal and professional standpoints. Despite the differences in job stability, the four participants acknowledged having felt isolated and abandoned. We argue that viewing research groups not as a community of practice, but a community of care is a more humane and desirable framework to model university research groups in these current times of exacerbating neoliberalism.