1st Edition
Healthy Relationships in Higher Education Promoting Wellbeing Across Academia
Self-care involves taking action to support, protect or maintain wellbeing. Relationships have a significant influence on these acts of self-care and one’s sense of wellbeing. Relationships are fundamental to individual meaning-making and crucial to the world of academia.
In this edited collection, authors navigate how they view relationships as a crucial part of their wellbeing and acts of self-care, exploring the "I", "We", and "Us" at the centre of self-care and wellbeing embodiment. Each chapter unpacks this idea in varying ways that demonstrate that relationships are a fundamental element of both work and personal life and how they intersect with wellbeing. The authors present critical discussion through visual narratives, lived experiences, and strategies that highlight how relationships, seeking social support, scaffolding opportunities to learn with and from each other, and changes in practise become acts of self-care individually and collectively.
There has arguably never been a more important time to raise awareness of self-care and wellbeing as central to the nature of work in higher education. Healthy Relationships in Higher Education: Promoting Wellbeing Across Academia highlights new ways of working in higher education that disrupt current tensions that neglect wellbeing and will be of interest to anyone working in this environment.
1. Vulnerability, self-care and the relationship with us and others in higher education, Narelle Lemon. Section 1. The intertwined relationship between us, we and I 2. Creative and Collaborative Expression as Contemplative Self-care, Jane. E. Dalton, Charlotte, Catherine E. Hoyser 3. "A Stitch in Time…": Scholar-Activism as Resistance/Disruption, Method, and Self-Care Practice, Rosalie D. Clarke 4. The Ripple Effect of Social Support in Academia, Kristina Turner 5. Creating a sense of belonging through self-care strategies in higher education, Susanne Garvis, Heidi Harju-Luukkainen, Anne Keary, Donna Pendergast, Tina Elisabeth Yngvesson. Section 2. Fostering connections 6. Building Belonging: A Grassroots Peer-support Network for Academic Women, Jennifer L. Beaudry, Narelle Lemon, Helana Scheepers, Flavia Marcello, Esther Wilding, Christine Agius, Simone Taffe, Birgit Loch and Virginia Kilborn 7. Alamus: Singing together for self-care and wellbeing within higher education context, Jasna K. Schwind, Emma MacGregor, Heather Beanlands, Daria Romaniuk, Lori Schindel Martin 8. Seeing Past the Mask: Rejuvenating Academia through Art Based Self-Care, Pattie Ann Pryma 9. Creating care-full conditions is institutional work: Research developers as campus earthworms, Tseen Khoo, James Burford and Jeanette Fyffe 10. Table chats: Research relations and the impact on our wellbeing as academics, Megan McPherson, Narelle Lemon. Section 3. Relationship with self 11. From Survival To Self-care: Performative Professionalism and the Self in the Neoliberal University, Emma Coonan 12. Lessons from the Trickster: Be Present. Be Empathetic. (Be Love). Be Playful, Marsha Heck 13. Discovering the Inner–Outer Self in a Time of Endings and a Time of Beginnings, Dr Rachel Taylor 14. Recovering Care for Past Publications: An Exercise in Vocation, Catelijne Coopmans 15. Authenticity and wellbeing in neoliberal times: Imagining alternatives, Bin Wu.
Biography
Narelle Lemon is an interdisciplinary researcher in her fields of education, positive psychology and arts, holding the position of Associate Professor in Education at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Narelle is a researcher who focuses on translating theory and evidence into practice to enhance engagement and participation for teachers and students across all fields of education. Recent research has investigated mindfulness in education, self-care and wellbeing to empower educators, arts and cultural education, and her award-winning scholarship of learning and teaching in the integration of social media for learning and professional development.
