Carmen Shields

Living ethics: a narrative of collaboration and belonging in a research team

In this paper, we document and describe our collaboration on a project investigating individuals’ experiences of identity, participation, and belonging in higher education. We pay particular attention to the formal set of principles that we developed to govern collaboration, ownership and authorship within the research project and the ways that those principles are enacted in our team. Through our collaboration, we have come to acknowledge our research team as a space of belonging where all team members are accepted and welcomed. This sense of belonging provides a personal perspective on collaboration that is missing in most studies of research collaboration. We use the motif of ‘living ethics’ to capture defining qualities of the relationship deliberately cultivated between and among research team members. Through this narrative inquiry, we advance theoretical understandings of the notions of collaboration, belonging, and ethical research practices that can serve as potential models but not a blueprint for other research collaborations.

The erosion of academic troth: disengagement and loss

This paper emerges from a narrative inquiry focused on academics’ perceptions of marginalization and belonging in Canadian universities. Through multiple conversational interviews over a 4-year period, the 15 participants described the ways they came to learn that the academy is not the benevolent place they had at one time imagined. Participants once believed their employment contracts were reciprocal agreements of loyalty with their institutions. We heard echoes of Paul Simons song, ‘There Must be Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’ as the participants shared stories of their efforts to disengage from their contractual agreements when they no longer felt desired or appreciated by their institutions. Their stories reflect a gradual recognition that academic troth is premised on the ruling relations of the academy and that self-preservation sometimes demands disengagement. We emphasize the ways that disengagement leads to both personal and communal loss.

The Art of Teaching Rests in Connection

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.