Arts-based research and life writing are underrepresented, misinterpreted, under-nuanced, in the broader conversations about educational issues. In this paper we use arts based research as a democratic means for engaging different voices and multiple perspectives for thinking and expressing ideas in the academy. Arts based research enables an understanding and exploration of the relationship between lived experiences,  art, and educational practice as a creative caring space for imaginatively practicing democracy in the contemporary world. This paper offers an excavatory account of women academic’s embodied experiences using artful interventions for enlivening body-mind interrelations and diverse perspectives. Through centring corporeal data as a means of life-art-writing (a synthesis of arts-based research and memory work), we engage care-fully to amplify the place of the body in the doing of scholarly thinking as socially just ethical scholarship. Specifically, this research highlights the role of the arts in fostering democratic participation and practice in the academy.

In academic work, a productivity-driven narrative is unfruitful and lacks an ethic of relational em-bodied-ness. Considering the notion of collaborative care in the broad sense, we use life-art-writing to consider an alternative approach to seek out em-body-ied care and mind and body wellbeing. We are three feminist researchers from Australia and South Africa, and we engage in ‘musing as theory’, which involves “meditative contemplation; thoughtful abstraction; critique as intellectual food; gustatory thinking” (Taylor, 2016, p. 204). 

Our objective is to mediate and disrupt the individualistic and competitive discourses in the academy, where academic subjects self-metricise in order to freely practice ethical care for multiple voices and plurality of perspectives . This scholarly work amplifies ways to question the singular stories of the academies we navigate and reframe disembodying contradictions and productivity-driven narratives. From a theory of ethics perspective, care of the self is a relational process which understands ‘self’ – ‘care’ not as two separate entities but “thought together” (Smith, 2015, p.137) as a site for transforming ways “to achieve new kinds of existence” (Allan, 2013, p.27). 

Arts-based educational research, as a containing space, opens up ways for dialogue and collective reflexivity to imagine new and different possibilities. We address the question: How can body-mind connections be creatively  enfleshed as scholarly spaces to rethink conceptions and practices of democracy in the academy?  Bodies inscribed in the ethics of materiality offer opportunities for re-imagining spaces in academia- what they are and how we use them. Finding joyful ways for collective, embodied, ethical care through scholarship can offer solace to women academics in the commodified competitive spaces of the academy.

Our theoretical framework is used to recalibrate the productivity narrative that drives academic work and often lacks the ethic of relational em-bodied-ness. We plug into theories of vital matter (Bennett, 2010), technologies of self (Foucault, 1988), and affective assemblages (Mulcahy, 2012).  Neoliberal portrayals of academic lives, as singular formulaic posturings in university settings, are disembodying, dangerous, and unproductive. In academic work, a productivity-driven narrative is unfruitful and lacks an ethic of relational em-bodied-ness. This paper studies women’s academic lives as an ethically relational experience that calls for enlivening body-mind interrelations. The artmaking offers a way to voice and “show oneself, make oneself seen, make one’s face [and body] appear before the other” (Foucault, 1997, p.243). 

Undertaking assemblage work with written text – prose, poetic and visual art, we explore what was produced in an artful(l) moment. In this meditative remembering of our life-art-writing experiment, we explore the academy as an assemblage- through awakening voices, making connections, and discovering joyful ways of fostering collaborative care in academia. We commenced a memory work collaboration in March 2020 during the pandemic and after the lockdown. Meetings were convened to undertake memory work which provided an opportunity for diffractive musing. This is slow theory focused on deceleration and wellbeing rather than slowness (Taylor, 2016). This entanglement of our work in higher education is ethico-onto-epistemological mattering. Ethico-onto-epistemological mattering is an embodying approach to scholarship that recognises and works through the interrelatedness of “ethics, knowing, and being” (Barad, 2007, p. 185). The notion of embodiment that informs our work is a lived experience related to power, location, and materiality, which manifests in bodily sensations, emotions, and entanglements of identity. The combination of embodied practice and diffraction provides a means to depart from the conventional taken-for-granted approaches to scholarly work. Thinking diffractively through embodiment, we work through bodily sensations, emotions, and entanglements to provide an account of life-art-writing, synthesising from arts-based research and memory work. Sharing stories in fortnightly Zoom meetings, we explored experiences of power, location, and materiality in the academy. These experiments involved collective reflexivity and examination of wellbeing in the spaces in our higher education contexts. We examined the machinations of neoliberalism, the experience of returning to campus after lockdowns, fears associated with returning to work during the pandemic, and the pressures we faced as women academics interested in career progression. We created poems and produced embodied diffractive artwork using Zoom transcripts from our discussions. The acts of painting and collaging were a means to recreate stories of our academic selves. While diffraction involved “break[ing] apart in different directions” (Barad, 2014, p. 168), the Zoom meetings created waves of practice for us to meander off and engage in new readings and further thinking. The Zoom sessions created an interference pattern in the routine of our week and brought about change in thinking and action. We played with paint, paper, fabric and foliage. The production of selves, as artworks in progress, was a way to seek out values in the pursuit of truth. We read our musings aloud, listened and collectively analysed the art produced.

As a contribution, this paper conceptualises life-art-writing as vital mattering that encompasses art making. Life-art-writing offers us materially situated ways to draw together the threads of memory, as a story of becoming, affirmation, ethical scholarship, and democratic voice. It weaves the vitality of bodies, memories, voices, and matter. Life writing with and through arts-based research enables engagement with the corporeality of the work-place/home-place assemblage. Bringing art and writing together makes our scholarly thinking richer than either form would be on their own. From a material lens, remaking our academic selves as/through life-art-writing create enfleshments that become a space to learn the art of living (Allan, 2013, p. 28). Against and within university contexts and singular narratives that drive what it means to be in the academy, our lives as women are inevitably imbricated in broader social engineering and dominant individualistic neoliberal discourses. We explored truths in our academic lives and what it means to reframe disembodying contradictions as enlivening mind-body shifts for a truthful, relational, co-creative, caring scholarship. As women academics connected transglobal via online home-work spaces, life writing takes on a momentary creative practice-based experimentation in which the individual and the personal entangle in a collective assemblage. Life-art-writing as lived, told, and experienced, became a questioning, meditative process to reimagine our academic lives as women scholars. In her book, And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism, Barbara Boswell (2019) argued that writing is a form of activism. In this genre, we “show our agency by creating and claiming a transgressive ‘discursive space’” (Pillay & Govinden, in process). Aesthetic life-art-writing, as a form of meditation for the pursuit of truth in academia and a collective reimagining for women academics, is crucial to the higher education imagination. Life-art-writing provides space to question and critique.

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