(Re)-Enacting Academia Otherwise: Cultivating Care-Full Communities of Practice Through Retreats

This paper explores the cultivation of joy on the margins of academia via the provision of holistic writing retreats for academic caregivers marked by community, care, and embodiment. The retreats operate as fugitive spaces away from the uncaring structures that shape everyday academia, ones in which we cultivate a different way of being/doing academic life. By slowing time, academic retreats allow attendees to connect more with themselves as well as one another and to reencounter their research in different ways. The provision of care for academic caregivers unused to receiving care is a radical move that interrupts academia-as-usual in powerful ways. In part one, we examine the ways that the temporal dimensions of contemporary academia foster a sense of lack that works against academic well-being. In part two, we explore resistance to the temporal regimes of the contemporary academy via the cultivation of a slower academy that prioritizes the whole person, not just the productive neoliberal subject. We argue that by giving the gift of time and supporting the whole person—body, mind, and spirit—academic retreats interrupt the “high-speed university” and create space for the rediscovery of pleasure and joy in the context of community and care. In part three, we acknowledge that our retreats are an exercise in impurity, simultaneously co-opting and being co-opted by neoliberal discourses despite our efforts to de-emphasize and reimagine productivity. However, as university-funded events, the retreats—however impure and messy—enact alternative visions of academic life that shape everyday academia.