In research, it is important to mind the human dimension, that is, not only our thoughts, ideas, and brains, but also our corporeality, our presence, and our affects. Research is done by persons, who usually work in relation to others. So we as researchers are subjects-in-relation. This calls for taking into account the ethics of care. According to Joan Tronto (2009, para. 5), 

An ethic of care is an approach to personal, social, moral, and political life that starts from the reality that all human beings need and receive care and give care to others. The care relationships among humans are part of what marks us as human beings. 

This means that although being aware that power relations exist in any collaborative work, researchers and participants are responsible for working in a good work environment, by paying attention to one’s and others’ needs, and mind each participant’s experience and reflections (Pettersen, 2011) in order to establish more horizontal and caring relationships. An ethics of care is constructed across the places and spaces and throughout all co-creative processes. This entails an affective response and an ethical response-ability. That is, having the ability to respond (response-ability) to the emotional-social needs in a way that predisposes us to learning in the best possible way for the entire educational community involved. 

Taking Haraway's conception of situated and relational knowledge, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) comments that knowing practices require care. Care is relational (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 198). Starting from the ontology of becoming, or an ontology that is made (in the making), Puig de la Bellacasa speaks of becoming-with and thinking-with (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 200). This invites us to move away from a culture of individuality and “seek common reasons for hope in concrete forms of situated “praxis”” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 203). Practicing the pedagogy of care means becoming aware - and responsible - about who we are (in relationship) and how we do things (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012). If we think of reality as relational, we enter into ecologies of being and knowing where our actions are constantly affecting not only our reality but a reality that is being co-created by all human and non-human entities that are in a concrete space-time-matterings. 

According to Andrew S. Larsen citing Gordon, Benner and Noddings (1996), pedagogies of care “consists of a set of relationship practices that foster mutual recognition and fulfilment, development, growth, protection, empowerment, human community, culture and possibility” (Larsen, 2015, p. 17). 

From this theoretical framework, two researchers wanted to explore ways to ‘create community’ in a network of researchers in arts education through approaching politics of care. The question that guided the research was: How to engage pedagogies and ethics of care in a research network? 

The aims were: 

• to explore to what extent visual and artistic strategies could build a community through care

• experiment in engaging new models of collaboration based on togetherness in arts and education research

• to invent new ways to create supportive environments and networks in arts and education research

To do so, we proposed to a network of more than 200 researchers in arts education to send us once a month a picture and an inspiring phrase showing something about their daily lives. This could be related to their job, their work, their lives, etc. Once we receive the images and the text, we upload and stick them on a digital whiteboard. After uploading the creations, we shared with the community the visual mosaic. The idea was to intertwine researchers’ lives with academic context to create a space of care and trust. Know who is behind the network. Which bodies with their lives inhabit the network. What are their interests, their styles, their senses (of humour, of friendship, of joyfulness, of connection with the job, nature, bodies…). The proposal ran for 4 months. The participation was completely voluntary. First month participated 21 researchers. Second month 12 researchers. Third month 11 researchers. Fourth month 9 researchers. The workshop to be presented in ECER 2024, seeks to work with these images and phrases and invite participants to create new connections among them, intervene them and reflect about ethics, pedagogies of care in creating community, a sense of belonging, sympathising with others researchers and think about how we relate with our colleagues in research contexts. The idea and expected outcomes of this workshop is to invite researchers to take the next step of this ongoing open and experimental research from a playful intention and through arts. Take the unknown as a routemap to create new forms of caring and supporting collaborative contexts. Connecting democracy in research and construct more democratic ways of collaborating.

This proposal is an ongoing research that looks for other pedagogical relationships among researchers and their communities or networks. It is part of an experimental neverending process in which researchers are invited to invent transnational collaborative models for research. The ontology of becoming proposes a relational, changing and contextual reality that invites us to think about a different subjectivity. According to Inna Semetsky (2006, p. 3), “the production of subjectivity is not based on any prescribed code, but is creative and artistic.” . . human experience itself must be considered as a condition of possibility. . . of becoming another, that is, different from the current self.” This places research practice in a relational process where each person must take their part of responsibility by being aware of their power to transform and affect the pedagogical-research encounter. And although we find ourselves in a situation with many not-knowings, precisely the importance of learning lies in recognizing and understanding them not as an obstacle that generates frustration, impotence, and blockage, but precisely as that which is not-yet-known (Atkinson, 2018), that is, as potentialities of knowledge-to-know. So that we can create ecologies of imagination from care, a performative ethic mediating the arts that allows us to visualize, project and create worlds that are yet-to-arrive (Atkinson, 2018). However, the materialization of new ways of being/living by researchers is not an easy task, since it requires not only “an ethical, epistemological, ontological and political process”, but also “an aesthetic process, a process of creativity and invention” (Atkinson, 2018, p. 33).

Atkinson, D. (2018). Art, Disobedience and Ethics. The Adventure of Pedagogy. Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62639-0 Larsen, A. S. (2015). Who Cares? Developing a Pedagogy of Caring in Higher Education. [Tesis doctoral]. Utah State University. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/4287 Pettersen, T. (2011). The Ethics of Care: Normative Structures and Empirical Implications. Health Care Anal, 19, 51-64. Accessed 17 March 2022: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3037474/pdf/10728_2010_Article_163.pdf Puig de Bellacasa, M. (2012). Nothing Comes Without its World’: thinking with care. The Sociological Review, 60(2), 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02070.x Semetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze, Education and Becoming. Sense Publishers. Tronto, J. (2009). Joan Tronto. Interview on August 4th, 2009. Ethics of Care. Sharing Views on Good Care. Accessed 17 March 2022: https://ethicsofcare.org/joan-tronto/