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Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 5, December 2020
1
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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V o l u m e 7
D e c e m b e r
202 2
Towards Academic Kindness – A
queer-feminist string figure on kinder
working cultures in academia
Anita Thaler & Daniela Jauk
4-10
On a heroine’s journey of living academia kindly:
Alternative myth-making from
a feminist STS collective
Claudia Gertraud Schwarz-Plaschg, and other kinds
11-24
Strong reflexivity and vulnerable researchers.
On the epistemological requirement
of academic kindness
Andrea Ploder
25-38
Pandemic Observations on Research as Impact:
Insider Research and Academic Kindness
Clara Rosa Schwarz
39-49
What can academic kindness look like?
Lisa Scheer
50-54
Minding and Mending the Gap between Academic
Kindness and Academic Justice
Kris De Welde
55-65
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum
A Journal of the Working Group Queer STS
Lead Editor
Daniela Jauk-Ajamie
Editors
Anita Thaler
Reviewer
Sol Haring
Birgit Hofstätter
Daniela Jauk-Ajamie
Sandra Karner
Susanne Kink-Hampersberger
Thomas Menzl-Berger
Anita P. Moerth
Anita Thaler
Magdalena Wicher
Queer STS
Anita Thaler
Birgit Hofstätter
Daniela Jauk-Ajamie
Daniela Zanini-Freitag
Jenny Schlager
Julian Anslinger
Lisa Scheer
Magdalena Wicher
Susanne Kink-Hampersberger
Thomas Menzel-Berger
Layout & Design
Julian Anslinger
Birgit Hofstätter
info@QueerSTS.com
www.QueerSTS.com
ISSN 2517-9225
The web version of this issue can be accessed here:
https://queersts.com/forum-queer-sts
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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Anita Thaler & Daniela Jauk-Ajamie
Editorial for Queer STS Forum #7 2022: Towards
Academic Kindness – A queer-feminist string
figure on kinder working cultures in academia
Anita Thaler is a senior researcher at IFZ (Interdisciplinary Research
Centre for Technology, Work and Culture) in Graz, Austria. She heads
the research area Gender, Science and Technology and founded the
working group Queer STS. Her research analyses mutual interactions of
science, technology and society, with a focus on transition and learning
processes towards gender equity, sustainability and social justice.
Daniela Jauk is Assistant Professor for Sociology and Criminal Justice at
the University of Akron, Ohio. Her research focuses on intersections of
gender, inequality in the criminal legal system, and sustainability with qual-
itative methodologies. As a certified clinical sociologist, she is interested in
applied and community-relevant research and hosts two podcasts (Correc-
tions Close-Up, Why Sociology?) as teaching tools.
This 7th issue of Queer STS Forum is dedicated to reflecting and advancing queer-
feminist working cultures in academia. We particularly interrogate the concept of aca-
demic kindness, which is an emerging theme and practice across disciplines yet not
often systematically discussed and defined clearly. While the esteemed contributors of
this issue might not intend to provide a theory of academic kindness, they offer a frame-
work of theoretical perspectives, empirical examples, and practical illustrations of this
very concept. This Forum, including this editorial, might remind queer-feminist readers
of Haraway’s “string figures”, actually “string figuring”, which she defines as “passing
on and receiving, making and unmaking, picking up threads and dropping them” (Har-
away, 2016, p. 3). This editorial then is quite intentionally not a perfectly woven gar-
ment/argument but a set of open threads we offer you for further play.
Anita first stumbled upon #academickindness as a Twitter hashtag several years ago.
She began to discuss the topic with colleagues – although not using the term itself
back then – when she researched gendered care politics and practices of RRI (respon-
sible research and innovation; Thaler, 2017). One of her first colleagues was Ester
Conesa, a visiting scholar in the IAS STS (hosted by IFZ, Anita’s workplace since 2004)
in 2017/2018, who was working on her PhD emphasising an “ethics of care perspective
in academia”. Like Anita, Ester was taking up the threads of Maria Puig de La Bella-
casa’s (2011) work on "Matters of Care", which provided common ground for discus-
sion. Together with her colleague Ana Gonzales Ester analysed (2018) psychosocial
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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risks of academia due to acceleration processes of new management regimes that not
only “… generate long working hours, relegating private lives and self-care linked to
personal well-being” (Conesa & Gonzales, 2018, p. 10) but also lead to an “erosion of
collegiality, unfriendly environments, poor academic quality and burn out“ (ibid. p. 10).
While working on the fifth Queer STS Forum in 2020, the theoretical discussions
around academic kindness were enhanced by experiences from our working group.
With the theme “Queer-feminist issues in pandemic times”, Queer STS Forum #5 was
the largest volume with the most contributors, despite the COVID-19 pandemic and
care crises unfolding on every level. The editorial team (Jauk et al., 2020) of the work-
ing group Queer STS recognised that their working culture had helped to receive great
resonance. When the collective published their call for contributions for the annual
open access journal in June 2020, they emphasised their sensitivity to the multiply
stretched live situations of queer-feminist STS researchers/practitioners and offered
low threshold and creative opportunities to participate, as well as peer reviews by “crit-
ical friends” who were instructed to help build, rather than tear down one’s work. The
workgroup came to label its work culture as “academic kindness”, incorporating self-
care and responsibility as well as care for others (see also Conesa, 2017). This expe-
rience sets the tone and substantiates the need for academic kindness. In this issue
#7 of our Forum, we invited colleagues to shed further light on the need for a cultural
shift in academia (and beyond) and to play string figures with us as we seek to better
understand the tasks and implications of cultivating academic kindness.
We start string figuring with Claudia Gertraud Schwarz-Plaschg and her anonymous
colleague sharing about their negative experiences in STS, as a specific academic
setting. You may already be aware of the online movement Schwarz-Plaschg started
with her public testimonial on abuses of power and sexualised violence within a pres-
tigious Harvard STS postdoc program. You may already be fighting alongside her
around the hashtags #MeTooSTS and #WeDoSTS that currently gather momentum
and provide a space for many survivors of academic bullying to speak out and resist
abusive academic cultures. We are honoured to host an extended reflection on queer-
feminist resistance in STS spaces by finding ‘your kind’ in a hostile environment. The
authors describe their experiences in the Feminist STS Repair Team, a virtual collec-
tive that serves as a container that allows for vulnerability, trauma recovery, and em-
powerment that is undergirded by feminist theories of care ethics. The authors also
expose how power abuse and narcissism are not a “by-product” of academia but its
very foundation. They suggest we ditch the hero and embrace queer heroine’s jour-
neys as cyborgs and goddesses.
Andrea Ploder (in this Forum #7) offers a manifest for academic kindness as a precon-
dition and fertile environment for empirically robust research. She frames academic
kindness as a powerful methodological and epistemological tool, demonstrating that
“some kinds of knowledge just cannot be produced without it”. (Ploder, 2022, p. 1).
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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Building on prior work on “strong reflexivity”, which centres the researcher’s position-
ality as a decisive epistemic source, she argues that strong reflexivity requires vulner-
ability. The researcher’s vulnerability can only meaningfully evolve and exist in envi-
ronments of academic kindness. Andrea Ploder is carefully discerning that researchers
in strongly reflexive research traditions such as autoethnography or ethnopsychoana-
lysis are typically more vulnerable in the academic mainstream, which often seeks to
wash them to the margins. However, academic kindness also requires not assuming
universal vulnerability and marginalisation. She unpacks concrete strategies to co-cre-
ate more academic kindness when she suggests that everyone of us needs to tap into
vulnerability as research partners, as reviewers, and as readers to enable and support
research under conditions of increased researcher vulnerability.
We are tying Andrea Ploder’s thread into the string figure complemented by Ulrike
Felt’s work on “Of timescapes and knowledge scapes: Re-timing research and higher
education” (2016), where she criticises the “ideal of efficiency” in research (p. 9). Felt
(2016) addresses the lack of appreciation of academic care work in the context of the
very essence of academia: knowledge production. She argues that the acceleration in
academia leads to “temporal care work” (ibid. p.14) and criticises not only that aca-
demic institutions fail to acknowledge this work but “appreciate the amount of work that
must be done and to understand how it impacts on knowledge generation.” (ibid., p.14).
Against this background, we strongly support and lift up Conesa and Gonzales’ (2018)
call for “an ethics of care feminist perspective that … counteracts a culture only based
on (scientific) productivity and undervalues care work (such as ‘academic housework’)”
(p.11). This means scientific excellence and research must be valued and evaluated
more wisely, as the Declaration on Research Assessment suggested in 2012. It calls
for a broader representation of researchers in the design of research assessment prac-
tices, for more transparency across all levels of knowledge production, and a move
away from harmful and skewed publication metrics to meaningful publication content.
However, to think about a kinder academia also means to think about a kinder envi-
ronment for knowledge production and new ways of conducting research with other
beings. Latimer and López Gómez (2019) have already woven an innovative string into
the discourse in a special issue on intimate entanglements in techno-scientific world-
making. They uncover how affect and intimacy in science and technology studies are
relegated to the interpersonal, corporal, and private yet are constitutive of truthfulness
and relevance in research. Donna Haraway embraces positive affect as research
method and ties in Vinciane Despret’s “virtue of politeness” in her chapter “A Curious
Practise” (Haraway, 2016, pp.126 f.). She connects it to Hannah Arendt’s “to go visit-
ing,” described as “… the ability to find others actively interesting … and to do all this
politely!” (Haraway, 2016, p. 127). Moreover, she contends that “Hannah Arendt and
Virginia Woolf both understood the high stakes of training the mind and imagination to
go visiting, to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose to-
gether something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for obligations of having met.
This is what I have called cultivating response-ability” (Haraway, 2016, p. 130).
Along these lines, Clara Rosa Schwarz “goes visiting” with her research participants
as she reflects on how an ethic of friendship and kindness played a role for her and
her research participants when examining queer friendships during pandemic times.
Her research is a fascinating attempt to highlight friendship as a method and to expand
on ‘intimate insider research relationships’ as suggested by Taylor (2011). For Clara
Rosa Schwarz, reciprocal kindness evolved during the research process as an unin-
tentional process. In her reflection on one dyad interview of friend-research participants
from a larger sample, she conceptualises kindness as an unarticulated premise for
intimate research. It expands beyond ethical norms in her research and “signifies a
more personal level of investment, a more egalitarian and more caring approach to the
relationship between researcher and participants.” (Schwarz, 2022, in this forum). Her
approach seeks to honour her friend-participants’ interests and vulnerabilities exacer-
bated by the pandemic. Her online research setting simultaneously provided a space
to cultivate friendships but also for conversations that would not have unfolded in
“mere” friendship chats. The dyad under consideration utilised this space to air their
grievances, apologise, and share their stories, illustrating the benefits of this research
for their friendship with each other and the friendship between the dyad and the re-
searchers.
We find another thread for our string figure in education research, based on positive
psychology, which could add to Haraway’s curious practice and Clara Rosa Schwarz’s
practices of kindness: The ‘flourishing perspective’ of Sabre Cherkowski (2018) com-
bines aspects of feeling good with meaning, purpose, connection, and engagement.
Cherkowski (2018) concretely suggests positive teacher leadership to improve
schools, e.g., by developing respective mindsets through questions – first asking one-
self and then reflecting outwards to / with others (Cherkowski, 2018, p.70):
• “Am I seen? Do I see others? (being known)
• Am I contributing my strengths? Do I help others to contribute their strengths?
(difference-making)
• Am I learning and growing? Do I help others to learn and grow? (professional
learning)
• Am I seeking feedback? Do I give feedback (appreciation and acknowledge-
ment)”?
In picking up these strings, we find that these questions could easily be transferred
from schools to higher education and research organisations. Furthermore, others be-
fore us have played with similar string figures. We read Maja Korica’s “A Hopeful Man-
ifesto for a More Humane Academia” (2022) as a call for a cultural shift in academic,
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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educational and research organisations to strive towards more kindness: “Our interac-
tions can either sustain or challenge institutions; make good ones better, or bad ones
worse.” (Korica, 2022, p. 1524). Korica (2022) lists five concrete practices, which could
be filled with detail and lived experience, and so make a big difference (p.1524 f.):
1. Value teaching, student support and collegiality.
2. Respect administrative and support colleagues.
3. Review and edit generously.
4. Don’t be inappropriate.
5. Call out bad behaviour.
This sounds so good, we want to do it, and it also sounds rather simple, right? Yet, it
might not be that easy for everyone in academia. Lisa Scheer reflects on her process
with academic kindness by drawing cartoons for this issue. Her out-of-the-box contri-
bution emphasises the question of who can afford to be kind. In her artist statement,
we learn that as she started thinking about kind practices in academia, she identified
those that everyone in academia could implement without much effort. Sending thank-
you emails to authors whose articles we discuss with students, providing positive
spaces (also for non-human animals), being an ally, celebrating colleagues, crafting
as care work, and many other ideas. She skilfully packs them into accessible and beau-
tiful comics that many of us will want to hang in our work-, life-, and breathing spaces
and share with colleagues and students! You may be as excited as we are about how
Lisa Scheer translated diversity and inclusivity into compelling and loving imagery
down to the fine print and her language. She also addresses in several places how
kindness implies very material aspects and means more than sharing thoughts and
words. We might even see it as an anti-capitalist practice of sharing time, resources,
and money through her visual invitation.
We add a final thread to our string figure of academic kindness (for now) by returning
to Lisa Scheer’s powerful question, “Who are the ones being able to act kind in aca-
demia?”. Are we adding even more work to the academic care work, to be done by
administrative staff, researchers with no permanent positions, women with migrant
backgrounds and other marginalised knowledge workers in and around the university
(Puig de La Bellacasa, 2011)? And how can academia as a system change? Kris de
Welde contributes these provocative and critical thoughts to this issue and explains
why it is essential to implement an academic kindness that is informed by and guided
by academic justice. De Welde (2022) is “minding and mending the gap between aca-
demic kindness and academic justice” when she interrogates academic kindness as a
“sweaty concept” (Ahmed, 2014) that may be necessary and effective on an individual
level but may not have the transformative possibilities for system-level change we
would want to see. Based on her research on feminist academic changemakers, she
emphasises the necessity and effectiveness of academic kindness. She also explores
the concept's gaps and traps when it leaves historical and cultural hierarchies inscribed
onto bureaucratic structures unchanged or re-affirmed. De Welde (2022) challenges
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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us to be awake and reflective if academic kindness is employed as a tool and control
mechanism of the neoliberal university that reifies power structures. She proposes to
mend the gap by (re)envisioning academic kindness as collective practice in queer-
feminist solidarity against oppression and injustice.
This string figure of the 7th Queer STS Forum on academic kindness, including this
loose and tentacular introduction and overview, can only be a beginning. We are curi-
ous and want to connect to all other thinkers and practitioners in academia and beyond,
who are already practising, breathing and working with and around academic kindness.
We strive to incorporate academic kindness even better in our Queer STS working
group and in our Forum. Please take a string or two, and hand us back another thread;
we want to flourish and continue to play string figures – with a vision of social justice,
collectively.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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References
Cherkowski, S. (2018). Positive teacher leadership: Building mindsets and capacities to grow wellbe-
ing. 9. p. 63–78. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334084087_Posi-
tive_Teacher_Leadership_Building_Mindsets_and_Capacities_to_Grow_Wellbeing
Conesa, E. (2017). (No) Time for Care and Responsibility. From neoliberal practices in academia to
collective responsibility in times of crisis. In: Teaching gender. Feminist pedagogy and respon-
sibility in times of political crisis (edited by Revelles-Benavente, B. & Ramos, A.). Pp 42–63.
Routledge.
Conesa, E. & González Ramos, A.M. (2018). Accelerated researchers: psychosocial risks in gendered
institutions in academia. Frontiers in Psychology. 9. 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01077.
Felt, U. (2016). “Of timescapes and knowledge scapes: Re-timing research and higher education”.
To appear in: Peter Scott, Jim Gallacher and Gareth Parry, New Languages and Landscapes
of Higher Education, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pre-print; Published by the Department
of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna, February 2016. Available at
http://sts.univie.ac.at/publications
Haraway, D.J. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Jauk, D.; Hofstätter, B., Thaler, A. & Wicher, M. (2020). Queer-feminist issues in pandemic times. In:
Queer-Feminist Science and Technology Studies Forum. Open Access Online-Journal, Vol. 5,
4-7. Download: https://mfr.de-1.osf.io/render?url=https://osf.io/vxt7j/?direct%26mode=ren-
der%26action=download%26mode=render [10.9.2021]
Korica, M. (2022). A hopeful manifesto for a more humane academia. Organization Studies, 43 (9). pp.
1523-1526.doi:10.1177/01708406221106316
Latimer, J., & López Gómez, D. (2019). Intimate Entanglements: Affects, more-than-human intimacies
and the politics of relations in science and technology. The Sociological Review, 67(2), 247–
263. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026119831623
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things. So-
cial Studies of Science. 41. 85-106. 10.2307/40997116.
Taylor, J. (2011). ‘The intimate insider: negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider re-
search’, Qualitative Research, 11(1), pp. 3–22. DOI: 10.1177/1468794110384447.Thaler,
Anita (2017). Care-Politics of RRI. IFZ Electronic Working Papers IFZ-EWP 1-2017. ISSN
2077-3102. Download: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316829780_Care-Poli-
tics_of_RRI [8.5.2018].
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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Claudia Gertraud Schwarz-Plaschg, and other kinds
On a heroine’s journey of living academia
kindly: Alternative myth-making from a feminist
STS collective
Claudia Gertraud Schwarz-Plaschg is a social scientist, writer, activ-
ist, and science communicator currently based in Vienna, Austria.
She has recently started the #MeTooSTS #WeDoSTS movement and
is a digital visiting scholar in the Social Dimensions of Biomedicine
Lab at the University of Edinburgh. In her research and praxis, she
dives into the sociopolitical dynamics of (re-)emerging scientific fields
and technologies, ethical and legal issues, the role of psychedelics
and healing modalities in society, gender studies and feminism, social
movements and community building, and the entanglements of sci-
ence, spirituality, and art.
My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you. But for
every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths
for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we
examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differ-
ences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me
strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living. … They gave
me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact. … I
am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
Audre Lorde: The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action
The start of our journey…
In March 2020, when the coronavirus had reached the United States, my dear friend
and I found ourselves no longer able to physically enter our respective respected aca-
demic institutions. Harvard and MIT had literally closed their doors on us. Metaphori-
cally, we had felt it long before the literal meaning manifested. Unconsciously, we prob-
ably thought that this could turn out to be an opportune time to also close some of
those doors that we rather would not have passed through if we had known what would
await us. The experience of one door opening, only to find out that there exists a whole
host of closed doors, in different shapes and sizes, appearing once you enter this Won-
derland. Often just a few nanometers apart. An academic institution is made up (it is,
of course, also made up) of so many invisible doors. And you only find this out when
you run into them, suddenly feel an impact, finding yourself at an impasse, especially
if you criticize what is going on at the institution itself, as experience teaches us con-
stantly and Sara Ahmed analyzes so lucidly and eloquently in her recent book Com-
plaint! (Ahmed 2021). That curious moment when we could no longer physically enter
the university buildings also taught us that every door that appears to be an exit is
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
12
likewise an entry and may even contain the opportunity to lift us up to a new level (see
Figure 1).
Figure 1: A door leading out of Stefan Sargmeister’s exhibition “The Happy Show” at
the Museum für angewandte Kunst in Vienna, 2015 (picture by the author)
I had met my dear friend a year earlier at Harvard, where we immediately recognized
that we were of the same kind, despite our differences. Independently, we had experi-
enced, and had been trying to make sense of, how contemporary neoliberal academia
demands conformity, compromises, and forms of complicity that often undermine the
very values that underpin feminist STS work and the ideals that brought us to academia
in the first place. The message we have repeatedly received is that we would have to
adapt and split off parts of ourselves in order to survive: in other words, to dissociate
from our felt sense experience, to robotically conform to performance criteria of “suc-
cess” and “excellence,” to change our values and betray our ideals in order to keep up
with the demands placed on us. Building on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois (1903), Doro-
thy Smith (1987) has elaborated on this phenomenon with her concept of “bifurcation
of consciousness” to describe the split between how female scholars as members of
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
13
the subordinate group actually experience the world and at the same time have to
adapt to the dominant, patriarchal point of view in order to survive in their professional
environment. A similar process of splitting interestingly can be observed among people
in captivity, who become experts in suppressing aspects of reality and holding contra-
dictory beliefs simultaneously in mind—think Orwell’s “doublethink”—to survive in an
unbearable, traumatizing environment (Herman 2015/1992).
We experienced that the university as an institution aims to replace our intuition about
what should constitute a healthy educational and research culture with a set of outside
criteria we did not agree with at all. The cost of refusing this replacement for job security
can be extreme: if you do not submit to hierarchical logics and existing (dis)incentive
structures at best, and harassment and abuses at worst; if you start to whisper to a
friend-colleague in private, raise your voice now and then to a superior in meetings, or
even dare to complain to the institution, doors keep multiplying, each one asking you
with a veneer of insincere politeness to reconsider whether academia is the right place
for you, as I harshly experienced when I was kicked out of the Harvard STS program
for speaking up about sexual harassment and abuses of power (Schwarz-Plaschg
2022). But what if we are not ready to exit academia (yet)? How can we continue our
research without losing ourselves, to act from and live as our whole selves, and find
ways of healing from the trauma that toxic academic settings inflict on us? How could
we live academia kindly with, and create safe spaces of refuge for, each other?
Precipitated by the pandemic, two strong currents of need and desire guided us to start
creating our own safe space. One was a longing for collectivity, for mingling with more
of our kind to overcome the isolation suddenly imposed on us by the pandemic. The
second was an intellectual desire for feminist and postcolonial STS literature that had
not been met at all by the STS environments we were embedded in or had passed
through. One of the last in-person public events we attended before the pandemic was
a feminist STS panel at MIT. This event closed out academic life as we knew it and
opened a door that was previously invisible to us but which we were eager to enter.
The virtual existence that we were hurtled into suddenly made it seem quite logical to
connect with friends and colleagues across the world who were also looking to the kind
of feminist thinking that challenged the existing patriarchal world structures underpin-
ning the global crisis. It took the closing of the physical doors to kindle the craving for
at least virtual companionship despite imposed physical isolation. A few weeks after
the slamming of the physical doors, we started merging independently created virtual
reading groups of feminist scholarship to form the nucleus of what would grow into a
larger collective pursuing of this (not coincidentally) shared desire. This core group
then started to grow continuously by inviting trusted colleagues into the collective.
From individual survival support to collective transformative empower-
ment
What this original group shared was not just an intersectional feminist interest but also
the shared trauma of having undergone the toxic research culture at the Harvard STS
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
14
program (see also Vinsel 2022). Although not all of us were there at the same time, all
of us who had lived through it experienced it as highly abusive. We were in the process
of healing from the costs associated with this former affiliation, which included making
sense of what was happening and why. It turned out that, rather than convening the
originally planned reading groups, our first meetings resembled more the trauma dis-
cussion groups I had been attending at the Cambridge Women’s Center to cope while
being a fellow at the Harvard STS program (for more on the importance of commonality
and groups in healing from trauma see Chapter 11 in Herman 2015/1992). After all,
what would be the point of reading these intellectual pieces if we were not yet feeling
whole enough to embody their content? We felt the need to collectively process our
experiences from this and other toxic academic settings: the traumas of harassment,
discrimination, and marginalization; of idea theft and abuses of power; and the general
lack and loss of anti-patriarchal, safe, and trustworthy role models and colleagues. The
spirit of open and vulnerable sharing of our academic struggles and traumas continues
to animate our meetings, and we draw strength and empowerment from this collective
container of support to continue to survive in, or simply understand, confusing, toxic,
and triggering academic environments. Some of us were even able to reconstruct and
reclaim our own narratives about disturbing experiences that had until then been dom-
inated and eclipsed by others.
One of our meetings focused exclusively on discussing literature on trauma in aca-
demia (Markowitz 2021, Pearce 2020, Thomas 2018) to reflect our own experiences
against a broader systemic level and get inspiration from other scholars who openly
discuss this tabooed topic. We also delved deeply into feminist care literature (de la
Bellacasa 2017, Mol 2008, Tronto 1993) to strengthen our theoretical grasp of care
relations as well as think about what it would mean to integrate caring practices into
our collective and individual research projects. My dear friend and I often talk in awe
about how the deep empathy and care we feel emanating from the collective helps us
to transform ourselves in ways we had never imagined. Through collective processing,
we are slowly outgrowing old versions of ourselves that had previously internalized
fault instead of recognizing the external, and systemic, source of our traumas. We are
learning to non-judgmentally and self-compassionately step into responsibility for the
role we did play—and do not want to play anymore—within the system. We are starting
to understand how our respective individual traumas had until then kept us in the cycle
of tolerating, but ultimately rejecting, abusive behaviors and environments in aca-
demia. In an interdependent web, the care and empowerment embodied by the group’s
relationships are in their very nature a radical departure from contemporary individual-
istic templates into which we are expected to merge to survive in academia. The sup-
port the collective offers is quite the opposite from the type of support we often receive
to help us conform to the structures which are not supporting us in the first place.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
15
Apart and as part of the collective, my dear friend and I mutually reflected on the par-
allels in our experiences of various institutional settings in recent and distant past. To-
gether, we connected the dots on how structural issues in academia reflect neoliberal
logics, which in turn tend to select for people who value competitiveness above care.
It was not until we began the collective trauma processing that we better understood
how narcissistic traits, abusive behavior, and wielding power over those who are vul-
nerable were not just unfortunate byproducts of academia but indeed tend to foster
success in academia and other competitive social arenas, where the individualistic
values of the upper echelons of exclusive patriarchal knowledge circles still largely
determine your fate. We use ‘patriarchal’ here in bell hooks’ (2004) sense as psycho-
logical patriarchy that is upheld not just by those with male identities but by anyone
who participates in and stabilizes institutions that rest on forms of domination along
racialized, gendered, and/or otherwise minoritized identities. The term ‘patriarchy’ here
stands for a general framework of domination that is based on subordinating other
human and non-human kinds.
This is not to say that every scholar ending up in an academic position of power had
to elbow others out to get there, but rather that, unfortunately, those who end up being
in a position of being able to extend kindness to those lower in the hierarchical structure
may be able to do so in large part because of preexisting privileges. Discourses of
meritocracy and chance (Davies & Pham 2022) serve to hide that successful scholars
often either come from privileged backgrounds or have sufficiently assimilated to dom-
inant practices to “make it” as a representative from a marginalized group. In the case
of myself and my dear friend, we were the first members in our respective families to
study and earn degrees at universities, and we both have experienced the toll of trying
to live academia kindly rather than competitively in terms of career progress. It is diffi-
cult to prioritize collectivist and compassionate values and simultaneously thrive in an
academia that is still largely built on exploitation, bullying, and the weaponization of
fear, guilt, and shame for control over others to come out on top (Täuber & Mahmoudi
2022, Thompson 2022, Ball 2021). Those who try to resist engaging with and actively
reproducing an abusive culture often either simply suffer, assimilate to some extent, in
the end conform out of desperation, or are eventually pushed out if they choose to set
boundaries to preserve dignity and self-respect. We strongly believe that any university
that truly wants to be seen as excellent in the future will have to broaden its concept of
excellence to interpersonal conduct, which means to count harassment, bullying, and
any form of discrimination as a form of scientific misconduct (Pickersgill et al. 2019,
Marín-Spiotta 2018).
We are (doing) the FeminiSTS Repair Team
Without having planned it, we co-created our collective from its inception as a space
in which kindness emerged through a mutual recognition of being of the same (hu-
man)kind while honoring—and caring for—our differences in lived experience and in-
tersectional identities. The virtual feminist STS collective serves as a space in which
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
16
we transform the struggles and hurts we experience in our regular, institutional aca-
demic settings through empathy and appreciation in a safe container that can hold and
potentially mold anything that wants to make itself known—be it anger, sadness, frus-
tration, shame, love, or joy. We usually start our meetings by checking in with our pre-
sent affective state, meeting first in our embodied, aware humankindness rather than
our mind-crafted, academic personas (see also Korica 2022), and only then do we
move on to the professional matters of the moment that call our attention.
From our first meeting onwards, our collective continuously grew, as already in our first
meeting one of the original four members brought in another friend who shared our
feminist interest but was a never part of the Harvard STS program, which the rest of
us were still metabolizing. She and other new members who did not share that experi-
ence were important sister-outsiders whose role often was to assure us that indeed
the problem is in the setting and not in us. If you have been told that the toxicity you
experience is normal, it often takes an outsider to point out that your gut feeling of
unease was always an adequate visceral response to an abusive situation.
The first few months of our collective also saw its naming as the FeminiSTS Repair
Team. The name resonated with the other members based on the de facto shape the
group had taken in terms of purpose and practices, so it stuck. But what we are is
continually reshaped by what we are doing and by the different members that come
and go. What is stable so far is that we have no director, no center, no telos. Over the
course of two and a half years, the membership of our collective has morphed and
shape-shifted. Currently, the FeminiSTS Repair Team consists of fourteen members:
some are dormant, some are very present and active. Most of our members identify as
women, some as queer, but all of us identify as feminists who believe in the fundamen-
tal equality of all humans regardless of their gender/sex (non)identification. We are
driven by a feeling-knowing that the systems and worlds we live in, and study, call for
urgent repair activities to restore balance between the masculine and feminine ener-
gies, or even redefine our understanding the world outside of this binary altogether, no
matter whether we identify as male or female or neither. We share the insight that the
repair we want to see happen and generate in this world needs to start within each of
us and between us first.
The FeminiSTS Repair Team works like a laboratory in which we test out tools and
practices to enable this holistic understanding of repair, which we then may extrapolate
into our relationships and communities beyond the collective. This can take the form
of repairing interpersonal relationship ruptures, or repairing ourselves sufficiently to the
point of being able to recognize which of our relationships are beyond repair—usually
the ones that depend on unrepaired, unhealed versions of ourselves (and others) and
therefore do not allow us to unfold our full potential. Above all, our repair efforts are
fueled by a desire to stop reproducing an academic culture in which the production of
our public academic discourse is decoupled from our actions in our immediate, often
private social sphere.
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While many of my reflections in this article emerge from my growth in the collective
container of the FeminiSTS Repair Team, I want to clarify that, despite my fluid use of
plural and singular pronouns in this text, my intention is to relate my own experience
of the collective as one part of a whole, as I cannot speak for the individual realities of
other human and non-human kinds in it. Not all members of the FeminiSTS Repair
Team necessarily share the same understanding of the interplay of the masculine and
feminine or of the form and purpose of repair processes. Some among us view the
group as a safe space of trusted friends to process and repair personal harm in order
to become viable participants in the neoliberal academy. I, among others in the collec-
tive, like to think of us as a team whose mission is not just oriented towards repairing
the individual psychological harm we experienced in academia, but to harness the
power of the collective to turn us into agents of change. The very fact that I was able
to take the courageous step of speaking out about the injustice I suffered at/by the
Harvard STS program bears testimony to the activating and protective potential that
our collective container is able to generate.
From the hero’s to the heroine’s journey
From the start, the FeminiSTS Repair Team served a very important healing function
for me because the harm I experienced at/by the Harvard STS program seemed to be
the most severe. As I detail in my recent Medium post (Schwarz-Plaschg 2022), I was
abruptly and cruelly excluded from the program by its director, professor Sheila Jasa-
noff, when I suffered a mental breakdown and tried to take back my agency through a
feminist snap (Ahmed 2017), after being sexually harassed for several months by two
cis-male, white colleagues. My distress became so unbearable that I had to break the
veil of silence and call out the unethical conduct of the two colleagues as well as the
professor’s much-too-close involvement with them. This unveiling was not tolerated
and the professor silenced, excluded, and tried to gaslight me into thinking that I was
the problem and a “threat to the men” in the program rather than protecting me as the
victim.
It was very difficult for me to process these unfathomable experiences. Narrating what
had happened time and time again was part and parcel of my healing journey. Each
time a new member joined our growing collective, we told our individual stories and
that gave me the chance to reclaim my reality each time a little bit more. At one point,
when I was telling my story again at one of our meetings, I was pulled back into ques-
tioning the validity of my experience—a detrimental effect of the gaslighting—and im-
mediately one of our members exclaimed: “But you are our hero!” These moments in
the team, combined with intensive coaching, psychotherapy, plant medicine work, re-
search, and activist training, were effective to reorient my story of self over the course
of three and a half years into one in which I had regained trust, self-efficacy, and pur-
pose. I was able to reimagine myself as a survivor with the capacity to step into a
leadership role by crafting a public narrative that integrated a story of self, a story of
us, and a story of now into a coherent narrative that could spark a movement (Ganz et
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
18
al. 2022). I feel very fortunate to have been able to do all this hard inner work, and I
want to acknowledge the elements of privilege in my life—mostly related to my white
European identity, the support and resources provided by the European Commission,
my home country, and the social networks afforded to me through my educational en-
deavors—that have allowed me to make it as far as I have.
As part of my scholarly exploration, I became increasingly intrigued by the mythopoetic
potential of the hero figure. As C. G. Jung (2014/1959) highlights, archetypes such as
the hero function as important devices in our psychological development as human-
kinds. Feminist STS has long had a strong affinity with the trickster as an archetypal
subversive figure that likes to exaggerate and invert hegemonic meanings to induce
social change (Haraway 1991). Specific periods and life stages call for specific arche-
types and I felt that the postmodern trickster was no longer serving me and perhaps
our culture more broadly at this juncture. So, I turned my embodied awareness to the
hero archetype in order to better understand and tune into its energy, hoping it would
empower me to move through and ideally reshape a neoliberal and still largely phal-
logocentric academia into something more resembling the kinder, feminist utopia we
are dreaming of.
I started where most stories about heroes begin: the monomyth of the hero’s journey
that Joseph Campbell (2008/1949) traced across different cultures by building on
Jung’s work (see left image in Figure 2). I engage with the hero’s journey as a narrative
template for personal transformation catalyzed through confronting and integrating the
shadow, i.e. all the disowned parts of the self in the psyche. Since the individual
shadow is also part of a larger collective shadow, the hero’s journey is ultimately about
bringing something of value back to one’s community. Narrated as a more outward
journey, Campbell’s hero—not unlike a scientific explorer—sets out on a journey when
hearing a call to adventure. Adventure here means moving from the sphere of the
known to the unknown—a movement into the unconscious in psychoanalytic terms—
with the (supernatural) aid of guardians, helpers, and mentors. On this journey, the
hero goes through a series of trials and tribulations that transform them in a process
of death and rebirth. As part of this atonement, the hero receives a reward that they
can bring back to society as a changed human being.
Campbell’s hero’s journey is the story arc that many Hollywood movies follow, most
notably the Star Wars movies. It has a male bias and lends itself primarily for those
coming of age waiting to go on their first adventure. Yet for those struggling to make
meaning out of life (aren’t we all at times?), it can certainly be worthwhile revisiting it
in later life stages. But again, such ancient myths might no longer fit so well with our
postmodern world. Changed cultural contexts necessitate new myths—a recognition
that feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway have long turned into action by engag-
ing in alternative myth-making.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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Figure 2: The Hero’s Journey (left, source: Wikipedia) and the Heroine’s Journey (right,
source: Story Grid)
The psychoanalyst Maureen Murdock (1990) embarked on her journey of re-writing
the hero’s journey by identifying a heroine’s journey (see right image in Figure 2). She
developed this template to align the idea with the female psycho-spiritual individuation
process she encountered in her therapy sessions with women (for a more recent ex-
ploration of heroine stories in myths and literature see Tatar 2021). In Murdock’s ver-
sion of the transformational inner journey, the modern heroine has to reconnect with
her lost femininity, heal the wounded masculine, and integrate both in herself to move
beyond binary identity concepts. The heroine’s journey thus turns out to be a queer
story. Some members of the FeminiSTS Repair Team struggle with the gender binary
of masculine-feminine and with attempts to ascribe certain qualities (e.g. active-pas-
sive) and ways of behavior to one or the other. Nevertheless, I have found working
with this duality of fundamental creative forces and the qualities that are associated
with them productive on my journey. I tend to be drawn more to the Chinese philosoph-
ical concepts of yin and yang and their powerful symbolic representation.
On my path, I discovered that Murdock’s heroine’s journey is an apt story arc for
women in academia who are urged to embrace the masculine in themselves in order
to find their place in this harsh competitive environment rather than nurturing their
softer feminine side. The heroine’s journey importantly emphasizes that repressing the
feminine in us, and that includes those identifying themselves as men, leads to spiritual
aridity. Donna Haraway (1991) famously proclaimed in the last sentence of her influ-
ential Cyborg Manifesto that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. The cyborg,
not explicitly gendered, signified an acceptance of hybridity with cultural influences,
that from goddess feminist perspectives would have been thought of as polluting. Now,
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
20
decades later, it is a given that we live cyborg existences, and it has become the more
radical move to affirm the goddess-goodness (i.e. kindness) in us again.
We’d rather be a growing heart emoji than a bunch of lonesome heroes
A core issue that emerged for me in my engagement with both the hero’s journey and
the heroine’s journey was that they are about individual journeys. This makes sense if
we consider the epistemic ground from which they emerge: Jungian psychology. Tra-
ditionally, the psy sciences focus on the psychological development and well-being of
the individual, but living as a feminist in STS, and academia more broadly, in the 2020s
necessitates to understand and live inner development as relationality. We are psycho-
spiritually evolving in and as collectives. Therefore, we need alternative guiding myths
that more strongly acknowledge our interrelatedness and counter the myth of the sole
intellectual warrior figure. To continue to exist in and positively impact academia from
wholeness, we cannot stop at individual role models or archetypes. We need to turn
equally to the stories of brave collectives that dare to show up with fierce kindness and
compassion (for more on the entanglement of kindness and power see Neff 2021). We
are convinced that by fostering an academic community in which we practice caring
relationality based on kindness and mutual support rather than critique and competi-
tiveness we are doing something heroic.
In this multi-media essay, I sought to offer my story of self and my story of us as an
invitation and inspiration to think with and enact what an individual and collective her-
oine’s journey of living academia kindly could be and feel like. Moving from individual
archetypes to collective archetypes seems an essential step if we want to engender
social change on a wider scale. Twenty-first century feminist STS polymyths—a term
I use to emphasize the existence and necessity of more than one guiding myth in a
culture—need to tackle existential questions pertaining to our place in STS, the acad-
emy, broader society, the universe at large, and how we can make this space more
just, livable, and welcoming to reach our highest potential together. At one point in our
collective journey, we struggled to write a manifesto that all of our members would
subscribe to. It remains a fragmented Google document with more comments than
main text until this day. It turned out to be more helpful to work out our differences than
reaching any consensus. Another, perhaps more feasible, approach could be to con-
tinuously reshape the archetypal stories we imagine, tell, and enact through our indi-
vidual and collective actions.
I found one such archetypal actualization in the story of a feminist complaint collective
at Goldsmiths that has contributed their “Collective Conclusions” to Sara Ahmed’s
(2021) book Complaint! We started to read Complaint! in the FeminiSTS Repair Team
but could not finish it together due to its challenging, triggering content, nor were we
able to become a complaint collective. I managed to finish reading Complaint! while
participating in a rehabilitation program at a health center for two months this year,
where I went to overcome the depression I had developed due to the demoralization
and continuing struggles for survival I experienced after complaining at Harvard. The
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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main healing effect the health center enabled for me was that I could complain about
several men who sexually harassed me there. To my surprise, I was believed, encour-
aged to report, and sanctions were imposed on the perpetrators. One of them was
even banished, not for the harassment, but because he got drunk and encouraged
others to join him in consumption in an alcohol-free setting. I would not have needed
him to be expelled to feel safe again, simply experiencing institutional courage and
support rather than institutional betrayal (Freyd 2018, Platt et al. 2009) provided me
and others who also complained with the assurance that we, and our feelings, mat-
tered. Instead of imposing a betrayal trauma on us, simple human kindness was ex-
tended to us. I have neither experienced such healthy reactions within my family sys-
tem nor within the academic system so far.
I think it mattered that I was not the only one complaining at the health center. Com-
plaints often need to become collective in order to be heard. One of the authors of
“Collective Conclusions,” Alice Corble, talked about the formation and work of their
collective at the hugely important “Silence will not protect us” symposium in 2022. At
the symposium, brave women shared and reflected on sexual violence and abuses of
power in higher education. Alice used a number of terms to represent their expansive
collective journey. The individual experience of harassment was the catalyst. Then
they became a chorus as they realized that many women had similar experiences.
Next came the formulation of complaint, which led to consciousness-raising activities.
All of these steps were embedded in collectivity and care. As Alice said during her
presentation: “Everything I experienced through my journey of complaint—although I
felt isolated and lost at times—was ultimately enacted through the necessary and sus-
taining conditions of collectivity and care.”
My dear friend and I often reiterate to each other our shared belief in the indispensable
power of collectivity and care to engender social change and to work towards justice
that we now understand must go beyond the individual resolution of complaints. I most
likely would not have been brave enough to come out with my story about sexual har-
assment and abuses of power at the Harvard STS program, if it were not for the Fem-
iniSTS Repair Team, the three brave public complaint-forerunners at Harvard—Lilia
Kilburn, Amulya Mandava, and Margaret Czerwienski—, and other sustaining collec-
tives I became a part of and helped to assemble. The success of Alice’s collective has
motivated me to walk in their footsteps and participate in creating a new kind of Won-
derland, a land where wonder is alive and kicking, and where women’s and nonbinary
people’s voices matter as much as those of cis-gender men.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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Figure 3: Transforming silence (source: Alice Corble)
Alice used the image in Figure 3 to visualize their collective journey. It conjures up the
image of the growing heart emoji and speaks directly to our frequent use of or
similar heart emojis in our team’s Slack channel that serves as our main communica-
tion hub. The image is neither a linear storyline—nothing is ever truly linear—nor a
circular loop—we need to break the cycles of suffering to get out of the loop—as is
common in illustrations of the hero’s and heroine’s journey (see Figure 2), but it sym-
bolizes an affectionate, expansive process that evokes emotional, pulsating human-
kindness, despite and likewise thanks to our shared cyber existence. Many in our col-
lective have never seen each other in non-virtual life, as we are currently spread out
over three continents and six countries, but we are deeply connected through our nur-
turing virtual practices and presence. What makes and keeps us human is no longer
bound to our immediate physical environments. The lesson I painfully learned at the
Harvard STS program was that a group of human bodies physically assembled by a
tyrant under a shiny banner with truth written on it can be deeply inhumane when it is
lacking the love without which we are less than human. The real truth I discovered then
is that all the knowledge and prestige in this world means nothing when the environ-
ment in which they are cultivated is a cold, heartless place. We’d rather be a growing
heart emoji than a bunch of lonesome heroes.
Acknowledgements
Thank you, my dear friend, for witnessing and sharing this journey with me during these
complicated years, and for contributing your words, wisdom, and wealth of compassion
to this text and my being. I am deeply indebted to all the amazing members of the
FeminiSTS Repair Team, without whom this essay would not exist. My heartfelt appre-
ciation also goes out to the many mentors, helpers, and aids that were and are still
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
23
there for me along the way. Thank you for your continuing kindness and support on
our collective journey. This text also benefitted very much from the encouraging feed-
back of two reviewers, Anita Thaler and Birgit Hofstätter, as well as and Mallory James’
insightful comments.
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Andrea Ploder
Strong reflexivity and vulnerable researchers.
On the epistemological requirement of aca-
demic kindness
Andrea Ploder is a sociologist at the University of Innsbruck. Her research
focuses on qualitative methodologies, history of sociology, sociological
theory, sociology of science, and science and technology studies.
1. Introduction
1
In the last decades, academic institutions have undergone severe changes. While ef-
forts towards diversity and targeted support programs have increased the chances for
members of (some) underrepresented groups to pursue an academic career, the work-
ing conditions for individual researchers have not improved – on the contrary. Many
academic researchers suffer from the accelerated pace, precarious working condi-
tions, job insecurity, and increased competition that come with new managerialism
(see e.g., Conesa Carpintero & González Ramos, 2018). Often enough, the daily strug-
gle in academia is so consuming that researchers forget why they wanted to pursue
this path in the first place. Under these conditions, fostering an atmosphere of kindness
among academic peers is a significant ethical and political goal in and of itself. But this
is not the end of the story.
In this paper, I will argue that academic kindness also has a decisive epistemological
dimension. Some kinds of knowledge just cannot be produced without it. This applies
to many areas of social research, but it becomes most obvious when we look at the
case of strong reflexivity. Strongly reflexive research can only thrive in kind environ-
ments, therefore creating these environments is not only an ethical and political, but
also an epistemological necessity.
The main argument of this paper is quite simple:
1
This paper has evolved side by side with an ongoing conversation with Angela Kühner and Phil C. Langer. While section 2 is based on a paper we wrote
together six years ago, all the other sections have benefitted tremendously from our joint discussions of our academic projects and lives. I am beyond grateful
for the emotional and intellectual space we share. Special thanks go to everyone who provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of this text: Dani Jauk,
Susanne Kink-Hampersberger, Phil C. Langer, Stefan Laube, Anita Thaler, Nicole Weydmann, as well as the participants of the panel on academic kindness
at the STS conference in May 2022. All remaining shortcomings are – of course – my own. Most importantly, I want to thank Dani Jauk for the invitation to
contribute to this panel. Apart from being a brilliant researcher, she is also one of the kindest, most enthusiastic, and inspiring academic colleagues I know.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
26
Strong reflexivity requires vulnerable researchers. And vulnerability requires spaces
of support and kindness.
I will support this argument in the following steps: After an introduction of the concept
of strong reflexivity (2) I will explore the relationship between strong reflexivity and
researcher vulnerability (3). Then, I will discuss the relationship between strong reflex-
ivity, vulnerability, and academic kindness (4). Along the way, I will try to sharpen the
notions of vulnerability and kindness for the topic at hand. While not exhaustively ex-
ploring these two complex concepts, I will point out how I use them in this paper. At
the end, I will highlight a few consequences of my argument for the debate about re-
search ethics (5).
2. What is strong reflexivity?
Reflexivity is one of the fundamental principles of qualitative research. In its most basic
form, it calls for a reflection on the researchers own involvement in data production and
analysis. Ever since the writing culture debate in anthropology in the 1980s and 90s
(Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Behar & Gordon, 1995), the methodological impact of reflex-
ivity has grown and spread to more and more disciplines. Today, the term is used in a
variety of meanings in different areas of qualitative research. Most researchers agree
on its relevance, but their understandings of the term are quite diverse. Some use it as
a means of controlling subjectivity on (post-)positivist grounds, implying an understand-
ing of subjectivity as ‘bias’. Others understand reflexivity as a strategy of using subjec-
tivity to examine social and psychosocial phenomena.
2
In 2016, Angela Kühner, Phil Langer, and I examined the epistemological role of re-
flexivity in qualitative research (Kühner, Ploder & Langer, 2016). Our main argument
was that the role of the researcher’s subjectivity in the process of knowledge produc-
tion is tagged by two contrasting positions:
Epistemically weak reflexivity conceives the positionality of the researcher as a disrup-
tive factor, problematic but inescapable. It aims at controlling the influence of research-
ers on the research process by making it explicit. These approaches can be highly
reflexive, but in an epistemically weak sense.
Strongly reflexive researchers acknowledge and appreciate their own positionality.
They use their entanglements with the field as a decisive source of data and interpre-
tation.
Epistemically strong reflexivity conceives the positionality of the researcher as a valu-
able epistemic resource. Strongly reflexive researchers embrace their entanglements
with the field and use their own sympathies, prejudices, fears, as well as emotional,
mental, and physical experiences as a source of data. They know that whenever they
2
In ethnomethodology, reflexivity has an entirely different meaning. For an inventory of different meanings of the term and a concise account of
ethnomethodological reflexivity see Lynch, 2000.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
27
produce knowledge about the world around them, they also produce knowledge about
themselves – and vice versa.
Several approaches in qualitative research use the power of strong reflexivity. They
have different methodological foundations but converge in the idea that the re-
searcher’s biography and lived experience are highly relevant sources of data. Exam-
ples are autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Anderson, 2006), ethnopsychoanal-
ysis (Kühner, 2016), and reflexive grounded theory (Breuer et al., 2019), to name just
a few. Many ethnographic studies are strongly reflexive as well (see e.g., Laube 2021),
depending on the researcher’s level of participation and on the way they analyze their
experiences in the field.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the interest in strongly reflexive research has
expanded and gained a new momentum among social researchers of all generations
(see Ploder, 2021).
3
As part of this boom, more and more scholars combine strongly reflexive approaches
with each other. One example is Alina Brehm, who successfully combines autoethnog-
raphy and ethnopsychoanalysis (see e.g., Brehm, 2021). Moreover, it becomes in-
creasingly obvious that other established qualitative research approaches can be prac-
ticed in a strongly reflexive way. That includes all variants of ethnography (see above)
but also biography research (e.g., Ruokonen-Engler & Siouti, 2016), and hermeneutic
approaches (like depth-hermeneutics, see Bereswill et al., 2010).
Strong reflexivity is situated.
Strong reflexivity is closely related to feminist epistemologies. It encourages a focus
on our unique individual standpoint as knowledge makers, and calls for radical subjec-
tivity as the stronger form of objectivity. This establishes a very close relationship to
epistemological concepts like strong objectivity, standpoint epistemology (Harding,
1993) and situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988).
Strong reflexivity is queer.
Because of their provoking and irritating role in academic discourse, strongly reflexive
approaches have also been characterized as queer (Holman Jones & Adams, 2016).
Like queer theory and practice, strongly reflexive research blurs categories and gen-
res, embraces art as a valuable theoretical and practical tool, resists orthodox meth-
odologies, is inventive, creative, messy, and personal. These features, combined with
the central role of the researchers own experience, make it a valuable choice for queer
social research (see Browne & Nash, 2016; for an example, see Preciado, 2013
[2008]).
3
As academic practice, strong reflexivity has a much longer tradition. An early example are the autoethnographic diaries by Michel Leiris (1934).
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
28
Why does strong reflexivity matter? Strongly reflexive research is appealing for a num-
ber of reasons. Some epistemological and political reasons have been discussed else-
where and do not need to be repeated here (see e.g., Kühner, Ploder & Langer, 2016).
But one reason must be mentioned, as it might convince scholars across all epistemo-
logical and political camps:
Strong reflexivity is empirically powerful.
Strong reflexivity allows us to study life worlds and dimensions of social life that are
very hard to access otherwise. That includes phenomena centered around physical
experiences and emotions (see Stadlbauer & Ploder, 2016) that are hard to observe
or address in interviews. Their most important dimensions are deeply rooted in the
individual experience of the people involved and strong reflexivity enables researchers
to approach these phenomena from a first-person perspective. Other phenomena can
be approached from a third-person perspective, but are emotionally very challenging
for researchers, highly anxiety provoking, and therefore understudied. In these cases,
strong reflexivity allows researchers to work through their emotional involvement, use
it as a source of knowledge production, and share it with their audience. Examples are
Carolyn Ellis’ evocative autoethnography about the chronic illness of her partner (Ellis,
2018 [1995]) or a recent study about child soldiers in Iraq (Langer & Ahmad, 2019).
3. Strong reflexivity and vulnerability
The empirical power of strongly reflexive research comes at a cost. It requires a lot of
commitment and is strongly connected to researcher vulnerability. Why is this so?
Strong reflexivity requires vulnerable researchers.
First of all, strong reflexivity requires vulnerable researchers. It depends on research-
ers who are prepared to work with their own emotional or physical experiences, even
if these experiences are anxiety provoking and they would rather look away from them.
This includes the whole spectrum of sensations between happiness and sadness, ex-
citement and anxiety, empowerment and exhaustion, enthusiasm and boredom, fasci-
nation and disgust. Experiences like these are the foundation of strongly reflexive re-
search and they depend on researchers who are willing to embrace unsettling experi-
ences as a source of data and share them with an anonymous audience. While working
through and with our emotions is key for all strongly reflexive approaches (for autoeth-
nography see e.g., Adams et al., 2015)
4
, it has been most extensively discussed in
ethnopsychoanalysis.
5
One of the key arguments in ethnopsychoanalysis is that social
research always provokes anxiety in the researcher. No matter which topic we are
4
One of the central qualities of autoethnography is “[t]o embrace vulnerability as a way to understand emotions and improve social life“ (Adams et al, 2015, p.
36; see also Brehm, 2021, p. 39).
5
The writings of Georges Devereux, a key figure in ethnopsychoanalysis, are also an important reference for many autoethnographers. An example is one of
the classics in autoethnographic literature, Ruth Behars book The Vulnerable Observer. Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (1997). In the introduction, she
relates the concept of vulnerability to Devereux (Behar, 1997, p. 5ff.).
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
29
dealing with, it always confronts us with ourselves and thereby raises emotional re-
sponses. Intense emotions in the research process often raise anxiety and most tradi-
tional research methodologies are designed to create distance to them. Ethnopsycho-
analysts argue that analyzing these emotions and the anxiety they provoke gives ac-
cess to the most relevant insights about the phenomenon itself (Devereux, 2018
[1967]; Kühner, 2018, p. 103f.).
Strong reflexivity creates vulnerable researchers.
Moreover, strong reflexivity also creates vulnerable researchers. Integrating our own
experiences and biographies often enriches our research, but it can also weaken our
positions in academic discourse. The details we expose about our private selves can
be used against us, in the discussion of our work and in the pursuit of our academic
careers (see e.g., Rambo, 2016). This is an inherent paradox of strongly reflexive re-
search: The higher we value subjectivity as a resource for knowledge production (i.e.
the more strongly reflexive our research gets), the more closely we tie the quality of
research to the researcher’s subjective accounts. The stronger the subjective account
of the researcher gets, the more difficult it becomes to argue for the validity of her
position – especially within standardized criteria for good academic research. Giving
up the authoritative position of the sovereign researcher and acknowledging her posi-
tionality disavows the claim of interpretative authority regarding the subject matter of
the research that goes beyond the pure self-reflection of the researcher (see e.g.,
Ploder & Stadlbauer, 2016, p. 756). As a result, strongly reflexive research increases
the vulnerability of researchers in more than one way.
6
In strongly reflexive research, vulnerability becomes visible in all its ambivalence. It
makes researchers strong and weak at the same time. It makes research personal and
political, stimulating and threatening, community-building and isolating.
What is vulnerability?
The concept of vulnerability is complex and has been discussed critically throughout
the last years. It is not easy to say what constitutes vulnerability, who is the subject of
vulnerability, and who chooses when an entity is vulnerable (see e.g., Mackenzie et
al., 2014a).
7
While this paper is not the place to discuss the concept broadly, it is
important to address a few of its pitfalls and show how this paper relates to them. As
Brown (2011) points out, ascribing vulnerability to certain groups or individuals can
have paternalistic, oppressive, controlling, exclusive, and stigmatizing effects, even
where it is meant to be ethically protecting and politically empowering. For a number
of reasons, Brown criticizes the wide use of the concept and suggests to handle it “with
6
In strongly reflexive research, the requirement and the creation of vulnerability are actually two sides of the same coin. Being open to attacks is a central
aspect of being vulnerable and by embracing our vulnerability as an epistemic tool, we often increase it. In her research on Shoah-Survivors, Alina Brehm
makes clear how closely related the two dimensions of vulnerability are. She writes: “I need to make my thinking and feeling visible (…) in order to (…) stay
vulnerable and attackable.” (Brehm, 2021, p. 37, translation by the author).
7
These and other questions were subject of an interdisciplinary conference Vulnerability. Theories and Concepts in Philosophy and the Social Sciences in
October 2022 at the University of Graz.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
30
care”. Problems arise whenever we use vulnerability in an essentialist sense, as an
inherent quality of individuals with a certain ascribed or experienced race, gender, age,
income, physical or mental health, etc. that – supposedly – makes them more vulner-
able to a certain kind of harm than other individuals. This approach to vulnerability is
politically powerful but it also gives rise to stigmatization, control, exclusion, and pater-
nalism. Similar problems arise when we understand vulnerability as a weakness, re-
sulting from a deficit, and as a feature that cannot be influenced by vulnerable individ-
uals themselves.
In this contribution, I am interested in vulnerability as a universal, “fundamental feature”
(Brown, 2011, p. 317) – a potential shared by all human individuals and many other
(more than human) entities.
8
This concept of universal vulnerability is shared by a
broad variety of authors whose concerns with and ideas about vulnerability are other-
wise quite diverse (like Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre; for
an overview see Mackenzie et al., 2014b, p. 4f.). Their core argument connects vul-
nerability to embodiment, sociality, and dependence on others. In the volume Vulner-
ability. New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy
Rogers, and Susan Dodds (2014b, p. 4) sum the position of universal vulnerability up
as follows: "To be vulnerable is to be fragile, to be susceptible to wounding and to
suffering; [… A]s embodied, social beings, we are both vulnerable to the actions of
others and dependent on the care and support of other people – to varying degrees at
various points in our lives.” Within vulnerability studies, this approach seeks to avoid
some of the abovementioned problems and create a foundation for shared ethical re-
sponsibility towards all fellow (human) beings. It also allows us to see that “we are all
vulnerable […] but the degree of our lived vulnerability varies through the life course
[…] an according to wider relational processes of differentiated politically constituted
subjectification and sociality” (Brown et al., 2017, p. 504). Depending on the degree
and character of concrete lived vulnerability of an individual at a given point in time,
the responsibility of others changes.
The case of strongly reflexive research suggests that the degree of our lived vulnera-
bility can also vary according to our own choices. Strongly reflexive researches choose
to tap into their vulnerability and use its epistemic power. In doing that, they use their
own vulnerability as a strength. At the same time, they put themselves at risk: Embrac-
ing the epistemic dimension of vulnerability can provoke emotional and physical pain
and it can jeopardize academic careers (see Rambo, 2016). The specific character of
vulnerability in strongly reflexive research certainly needs to be examined in more de-
tail. The universal vulnerability approach does not solve all the theoretical and political
problems mentioned above and it certainly raises a few other philosophical questions.
But it is a helpful starting point to think about vulnerability in the context of strongly
reflexive research.
8
Much of the debate about vulnerability is centered around human actors, but it is easy to see why vulnerability is not an exclusive human quality.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
31
4. Strong reflexivity, vulnerability, and academic kindness
Strongly reflexive research is empirically powerful but it increases the vulnerability of
researchers. Where does that leave us? How can we use the power of lived experience
and vulnerability as an epistemic resource?
Creating knowledge under conditions of increased vulnerability requires extensive sup-
port from academic peers. It requires a safe environment that is based on academic
kindness. Among several other dimensions of kindness (some of them elaborated else-
where in this issue) this includes at least three layers of support among peers:
The first layer is a reliable and stable group of research partners. One or two friendly
peers (with a lot of other responsibilities) are not enough to support a strongly reflexive
research project from the beginning to the end. It takes a group that is big enough to
support the researcher throughout the project and small enough to build trust.
Strongly reflexive research requires kind research partners.
Similar to interpretation groups in other qualitative research traditions, strongly reflex-
ive researchers need groups of peers who listen and work through their narrative with
them.
9
They need spaces to share their anxieties, desires, and hopes, and peers who
are willing to think and feel with them. They need to hear and see how their experience
resonates with others, what their feelings provoke in them, what is a strong interpreta-
tion or narrative, and what has the potential to become one. Vulnerable researchers
need research partners who will listen without judgement, who will not shy away from
their tears, their revived trauma, and their feelings of hatred, fear, and love towards
research participants.
10
Vulnerability alone does not generate good strongly reflexive knowledge. It is possible
to share a lot of details about our private lives without making the research based upon
it strong in an epistemological sense. In short: Not every confessional tale makes good
research. In order to use the epistemic power of their vulnerability and turn it into strong
research, researchers can benefit a lot from reliable research partners and a kind re-
search environment.
Strongly reflexive research requires kind reviewing cultures.
The second layer concerns the publishability of strongly reflexive research. Sharing
our work in publication outlets is necessary for the academic survival of researchers,
and editors as well as reviewers have a decisive role in this process. A kind reviewing
9
Within the field of qualitative research, the importance of research collectives for knowledge production is widely acknowledged. The concept of the “data
session”, “group interpretation” and “interpretation groups” has been elaborated in both methodological textbooks and – more recently – from a sociology of
science perspective (Reichertz, 2013; Meier zu Verl/Tuma, 2021; Berli; 2021). Yet, so far, the epistemic relevance of a kind atmosphere is only rarely addressed
in the methodological literature. Many existing research collectives promote and live a kind environment, but without making the “kindness factor” explicit in the
methodological literature. In textbooks about strongly reflexive research approaches, this aspect is reflected more explicitly (for ethnopsychoanalysis see Bonz
et al., 2017; for reflexive grounded theory see Breuer et al., 2019, p. 324ff.).
10
On the methodological relevance of affective and “intimate entanglements” in the research relationship, see Latimer & López Gómez, 2019.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
32
culture is important for all researchers
11
, and it is particularly vital for researchers who
work under conditions of increased vulnerability. In order to appreciate the strengths
of strongly reflexive research and help to increase its quality, reviewers need to share
their reactions (their thoughts, emotions, enthusiasm, doubts, etc.) in a way that allow
the author and their work to grow.
Being a kind reviewer does not imply the absence of critique, on the contrary. It calls
for a constructive way to share criticism, a way that acknowledges both the strengths
and the limitations of the work and helps researchers to develop its full potential. One
powerful strategy for the development of a kind review culture as an editor is sharing
the name of the reviewers with the authors. Several journals are doing that already,
some have started to share the names of reviewers in the published paper. This en-
courages reviewers to make an effort towards constructive critique and a respectful
voice. It also increases the value of reviewing as a form of academic service and allows
reviewers to take credit for their efforts.
Strongly reflexive research requires kind readers.
The third layer concerns readers. Some strongly reflexive approaches – like evocative
autoethnography – explicitly address the relevance of a good writer-reader-relation-
ship. Like all performative researchers, evocative autoethnographers are convinced
that the research process does not end with the researcher but extends into the expe-
rience of readers. To support this process, writers need to make an effort to produce
engaging texts, and readers need to be open to a reading experience that touches and
transforms them (see e.g., Richardson & Adams St. Pierre, 2005). In order to connect
to the performative levels of strongly reflexive research, readers need to tap into their
own vulnerabilities and become part of an ongoing research process. This implies a
kind attitude towards the researchers whose work they are engaging with.
Kind environments like these enable researchers to embrace their vulnerability and
thereby create the epistemological conditions for strongly reflexive research. With a
network of kind peers, researchers can use their biographies and their physical and
emotional experiences, anxieties, and resistance as a source of data. It enables them
to perform ‘strong analysis’ and tell ‘strong stories’ that will touch their audience and
spark moments of performative knowledge-making.
What is academic kindness?
Similar to vulnerability, the concept of kindness is complex and the term has been used
in a variety of meanings. In this paper, I cannot dig deep into the philosophical debate
on kindness.
12
Further research will most certainly highlight a number of connections
11
This argument has been made frequently throughout the last years (see e.g., Vazire, 2022).
12
The debate about kindness can be traced back to ancient philosophy, often raised in the context of ethics. In contemporary philosophy, the term is most
present in ethics of care. The editors of this Queer-Feminist-STS Forum, who pointed out several dimensions of kindness in their introduction. See also the
strongly reflexive contribution by Birgit Hofstätter (2017) on the art of kindness towards chosen kin in the second issue of Queer-Feminist STS-Forum.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
33
between academic kindness and epistemological questions and enable a more precise
definition of kindness in this context.
For now, I propose to look at academic kindness in close connection to researcher
vulnerability. Vulnerability as a universal condition (see above) is a powerful starting
point to think about kindness in academia. It suggests that academic peers need to tap
into their own vulnerability as research partners, as reviewers, and as readers, in order
to enable research under conditions of increased researcher vulnerability. From an
epistemological point of view, this dimension of academic kindness fosters the creation
of spaces for knowledge production that are characterized by shared vulnerability.
These spaces are an important part of the epistemic foundation for strongly reflexive
research.
5. A note about research ethics
The epistemological dimensions of vulnerability and kindness are not identical with
ethical and political demands for academic kindness, but they intersect in important
ways. Therefore, I want to include a brief note about research ethics, mostly to encour-
age further research on this topic:
One of the most basic requirements of research ethics is to avoid harm to our research
participants (see e.g., Wiles, 2013, p. 55ff.; von Unger et al., 2014). This includes re-
searchers, which becomes particularly obvious in strongly reflexive research. Strongly
reflexive research is often painful and emotionally demanding, and it requires looking
at parts of our lives we would rather look away from. It is very tempting to stop the
project when problems arise, and in order to complete a strongly reflexive research
project, we need to commit to it again and again. In this process, we need peers who
show us that we can pursue this path and are willing to walk it with us. And if it is no
longer safe for us to pursue the project, we need them to tell us that we are allowed to
stop. Without a network of kind peers, strongly reflexive researchers cannot protect the
emotional integrity of all their research participants – including themselves.
Debates about research ethics are often linked to the question of vulnerability.
13
In
order to live up to our ethical responsibility as researchers, we need to make an effort
to find out about the specific vulnerabilities of our research participants and protect
them as well as we can (von Unger, 2021). At the same time, questions of ethics and
vulnerability are closely linked to methodological considerations, including epistemol-
ogy (see e.g., Kühner & Langer, 2010). As von Unger (2017) put it in a talk at the
Berliner Methodentreffen qualitative Forschung – ethical and methodological questions
are “two sides of the same coin”: Methodological decisions can solve or cause ethical
problems, and every ethical challenge tells us something important about the field we
do research in.
13
See, e.g., von Unger, 2021 and the introduction and contributions to the special issue of Forum: Qualitative Social Research by Roth & von Unger, 2018.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
34
The case of strong reflexivity shows that our ethical responsibility as researchers in-
cludes ethical responsibility towards ourselves (see e.g., Tamas, 2009; Wiles, 2013).
14
Making ourselves visible in our data and analysis increases our vulnerability and
thereby our exposure to potential harm. How can we deal with that from an ethical point
of view? The most widespread strategies for protecting research participants from
harm are a respectful and sensitive attitude during data production, and the anony-
mization of data before publication. While some strongly reflexive researchers do
anonymize their texts (e.g., Anonymous, 2021), this is not a sustainable strategy for
those whose careers require a certain degree of visibility within their academic com-
munity. But if we cannot protect vulnerable researchers with anonymity, we have to
foster an academic culture that encourages respect and sensitivity among researchers
and decisively sanctions personal attacks. In this light, a kind research environment is
not only an epistemological, but also an ethical condition for good strongly reflexive
research.
These considerations become even more important in light of the political debate about
emotional capitalism (Illouz, 2007). As some critics have rightfully pointed out, ap-
proaches like autoethnography support the exploitation of our individual biographies
for career purposes: Even if that is not their primary goal, autoethnographers use their
individual biographies, experiences, and traumas as an investment in the academic
market (Tamas, 2009). In a time when the exploitation of biographical narrative and
private feelings as a commodity is encouraged in a number of everyday contexts (Il-
louz, 2007), this creates significant political tension and raises additional ethical ques-
tions.
15
6. Conclusions
In recent years, scholars from different disciplines have pointed out the importance of
kind research environments and called for a radical shift in academic culture. Some of
the most important contributions came from scholars in feminist, queer, and postcolo-
nial studies (see e.g., Kulpa & Silva, 2016).
16
Promoting a broader implementation of
academic kindness is also one of the goals of this issue, the Queer-Feminist Science
and Technology Studies Forum #7.
In this paper, I wanted to highlight the epistemological dimensions of academic kind-
ness. I argued that the production of strongly reflexive knowledge is closely connected
to researcher vulnerability and requires kind research partners, reviewers, and read-
14
For a broader discussion of research ethics and autoethnography, mostly focusing on ethical responsibilities towards other research participants (not the
author herself), see e.g., Ellis, 2007; Edwards, 2021.
15
For a more extensive discussion of this problem see Ploder & Stadlbauer, 2016, p. 758.
16
Looking at academic cultures from a queer and postcolonial perspective sheds light on scholars and research areas operating at the margins of hegemonic
academia and highlights the dynamics of exclusion in academic life. Operating at the margins of an institution gives a lot of opportunities to experience the
absence of kindness and, through that, a strong sense for the relevance of kind relationships for academic work.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
35
ers. In pursuing this argument, I developed a more specific understanding of re-
searcher vulnerability and academic kindness in relation to strongly reflexive social
research.
The example of strong reflexivity shows that vulnerability and academic kindness are
vital for contemporary qualitative research. It shows that qualitative research – if con-
ducted in a strongly reflexive way – requires and creates vulnerable researchers and
implies specific ethical responsibilities that need to be examined in more detail. And it
shows that we can understand academic kindness as a research environment charac-
terized by shared vulnerability.
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Clara Rosa Schwarz
Pandemic Observations on Research as Impact:
Insider Research and Academic Kindness
Clara Rosa Schwarz is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University
of Freiburg. They hold an MSc in Gender (Sexuality) from the London
School of Economics and a BA in Sociology from Goethe University in
Frankfurt.
Introduction
Doing social research during a pandemic is difficult but doing transnational research in
a phase of lockdown was a particular challenge. To approach this challenge for my
doctoral research on how queer friendships developed during the Covid-19 pandemic
in Germany and the United Kingdom, I conducted video-based discussions with friend
groups and dyads, asking them to share their experiences of the pandemic. The dis-
cussions were conducted in 2021 via video-call, as most interaction took place digitally
during phases of lockdown. My intention was to mirror this experience of video-based
social interaction, and thereby to meet the friends in a space that many used increas-
ingly in their private lives, too (Self, 2021; Watson, Lupton and Michael, 2021). I fo-
cussed on how I could gain insight into friendships as the object of my research by
using friendship as a method, and whether it was feasible to conduct discussions via
video-call while maintaining ethical and academic standards. I addressed data protec-
tion and informed consent with participants, but only later considered what the (group)
discussions would be like for my participants. Being invited to a conversation with their
friends that would be guided but also observed closely could be challenging for them.
Many had gotten to know this setting rather intimately over the first nine months of the
pandemic, and suddenly a researcher intruded into this space. However, when the
researcher is an insider to the community or to the friendship itself, participants’ expe-
riences with the research are not entirely straight forward. Thus, in this essay, I explore
the impact of my research on the participants of the study, using the individual partici-
pant experience as a point of departure. In particular, I focus on the positive impact on
participants and evaluate the role of kindness in this (insider) researcher-researched
relationship. In line with the theme of this issue, academic kindness, I ask how kindness
translates to the research situation, in what ways I could and did offer kindness to my
research participants, and what the limitations of kindness in this scenario are.
My consideration of the positive impacts of my research on the participants is inspired
by a blog post by Maria Tomlinson, who researches ‘menstrual activism and its impact’
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
40
(2021). Tomlinson’s post explores the impact of her research on the teenagers partic-
ipating in her study. She proposes that researchers ‘can have a positive impact during
[their] fieldwork itself’, rather than through the (published) results alone (2021).
Through sharing what her participants gained from participating in focus groups, for
example, the space to share experiences and ask Tomlinson questions, she shifts the
focus from ‘what we could learn from our participants’ to ‘what they might gain from
taking part’ (Tomlinson, 2021) in the research. I apply Tomlinson’s question of what
the benefits for the participants are to the fields of insider and friendship research,
fields that previously concerned themselves mainly with questions of their merits for
the research and negative impacts on participants (Taylor, 2011). While much attention
has been paid to the relationships formed during research, much less attention was
given to doing research with our own friends or participants who are friends with each
other (Taylor, 2011).
As a small case study, I will explore a discussion I conducted with two close friends of
mine who are close friends with each other. I picked this case from a larger sample of
friend dyads and groups that I conducted discussions with for my PhD research, choos-
ing only one case to examine in detail for the purpose of this paper (Flyvbjerg, 2006:
2). This dyad was suitable because it was one of few discussions in which a conflict
between the friends was discussed and resolved in the conversation that I facilitated.
Based on the discussion with this dyad, I examine the benefits of my research for the
pair and think through research as impact in pandemic times. Their discussion was
framed by the early weeks of the pandemic, in which the two of them had differing
views on personal safety, and the research setting gave them a space to thoroughly
discuss their respective positions and for apologising to each other. The main benefit
for them, I argue, was the facilitation of a space which explicitly presupposed a con-
versation about their friendship for my research, thus being somewhat public, but was
also intimate because it was facilitated by me, an intimate insider in this context (cf.
Taylor 2011). Ultimately, they both described the experience as beneficial. In what fol-
lows, I first give methodological context for my study, then I introduce two methodolog-
ical approaches: friendship as method and intimate insider research. I then share three
observations from my research and analyse them in light of Tomlinson’s invitation to
consider how the process might benefit participants. Lastly, I identify some of the limi-
tations I encountered in conducting these conversations on friendship during an ongo-
ing pandemic.
Methodological context
To provide some context for how the (group) discussions were conducted, how I sam-
pled participants, and how I communicated my ‘insider’ position to participants, I now
briefly give an overview over the research process. Building on the method of group
discussions (a qualitative method similar to focus groups but specifically located in
social research, rather than the focus groups more closely aligned with market re-
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
41
search (Bohnsack, 2014)), I conducted discussions with groups and dyads. The dis-
cussions with dyads, while bearing the possibility to turn into a couple-interview (Hir-
schauer, Hoffmann and Stange, 2015), were more closely aligned with the group dis-
cussion format, which is why I refer to them as discussions rather than interviews. I did
not interview the participants with a set of questions but instead offered initial prompts
and invited the friends to talk to each other, allowing their conversations to flow more
naturally. Therefore, I use the term (group) discussions to describe the approach. To
sample participants, I used my network within queer communities in Germany and the
UK to share my call for participants on social media and asked queer organisations to
share the call on their websites and in their newsletters. Social media turned out to be
the most successful sampling strategy, which also ensured that participants had ac-
cess to my social media profiles
1
, thereby getting insight into who I am. My profile
illustrates my queerness and provides demographic data about my person. Further-
more, because many participants were friends of mine or friends of friends, I could be
certain that my identification and positionality were transparent. Participants then ap-
proached me, expressing interest in participation, which I followed up by asking them
to recruit their friends to join (Jones et al., 2018). I then shared with them a written
overview of how the discussions would take place and how their data would be pro-
cessed and stored, thereby asking them for their informed consent, which I confirmed
once more during the video-meeting. I met once with each group, conducting one to
two hours long discussions, and have made plans to meet with each group one more
time in the future. Initiating the discussions, I shared what my role during the meeting
would be: semi-silent observer who might occasionally interject to ask clarifying ques-
tions. I offered to answer any questions before or after the discussion, and participants
asked a variety of questions regarding my research motivation, my positionality, and
my progress. A few of the groups invited me to share my experiences of certain issues
during the discussions, often related to the regional pandemic experience or my inspi-
ration for this research topic. I answered all questions honestly and met participants
with friendship as method in mind – explained in the following section.
Friendship as method and intimate insider research
Because the pandemic has exacerbated feelings of loneliness (Peterson, Vaughan
and Carver, 2021), I had concerns about asking participants to share their experiences
and asking them to be vulnerable in a digital space, from which they would ultimately
return to their locked-down living situations (cf. Cheded and Skandalis, 2021). How-
ever, only a few of the participants lived alone; several visited each other or lived to-
gether and joined the call together, while others lived alone and called alone. To help
support the transition from the potentially difficult conversation to the post-discussion
solitude, I invited participants to decide how long they wanted to stay on the call, and
in some cases concluded the discussions with informal chatting after I had stopped the
recording. As an intimate insider researcher, I knew some of the participants privately,
1
I shared via Twitter and Instagram.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
42
some were acquaintances, some were close friends of mine. While this constituted
part of my research design, which I approached with friendship as method in mind
(Tillmann-Healy, 2003), it also raised ethical questions of intimate insider research
(Taylor, 2011).
2
In the following section, I introduce both approaches and put them in
conversation with academic kindness.
Friendship as method, introduced by Lisa Tillmann-Healy (2003), suggests that re-
searchers approach their participants with care and an ethic of friendship. Tillmann-
Healy developed close friendships with a group of gay men whom she was researching
and discovered the merits of shared intimacy for ethnographic approaches. Im-
portantly, Tillmann-Healy writes, ‘Friendship as method is neither a program nor a
guise strategically aimed at gaining further access. It is a level of investment in partic-
ipants’ lives that puts fieldwork relationships on par with the project’ (735). The aim of
friendship as method is not only to approach the participants, but the research itself,
with friendship in mind. That is, the ‘practices, the pace, the contexts, and the ethics of
friendship’ (734) should be central to research with a friendship as method approach.
I find Tillmann-Healy’s initiative to utilise the practices and contexts of friendship deeply
applicable for my work: friendships, alongside most interpersonal interactions, shifted
to digital spaces during the first lockdown. This means that conducting (group) discus-
sions with participants who share friendship over video-call allowed me to meet many
(though not all) of the participants in the digital setting they were using to spend time
with their friends. The ‘practices, the pace, [and] the contexts’ of friendship (Tillmann-
Healy, 2003) were central to how I conducted the discussions.
I shared different levels of intimacy and acquaintance with my participants. Some were
close friends of mine, others were friends of friends, and some I was meeting for the
very first time.
3
I wanted to approach all participants with an ethic of friendship, but of
course the degrees of closeness I experienced towards them, and they towards me,
varied, too. To find a level of connection with all of them, one that was inspired by the
ethic of friendship, was born out of academic kindness. Academic kindness, here, ex-
pands beyond ethical research standards, to me it signifies a more personal level of
investment, a more egalitarian and more caring approach to the relationship between
researcher and participants. Centring kindness allowed me to approach each partici-
pant in each group with compassion and with openness, ultimately, it helped me ap-
proximate an ethic of friendship.
Researching the friendships of queer people, I was already an insider by being queer
myself and sampling from communities I was part of, but this was reinforced by my
friendship to several of the participants. Jodie Taylor (2011) calls this ‘intimate insider
research’, that is, researching from not only an insider position, but an insider position
2
I have briefly discussed the ethical considerations of this study elsewhere (Schwarz, 2022).
3
In contrast to Tillmann-Healy, who was acquainted with many of her participants but developed friendships through the research, I already shared friendship
with some of my participants. This is mainly owed to the snowball sampling technique I used, whereby I initiated the sampling process through my personal
network in queer communities in Germany and the UK (cf. Jones et al., 2018).
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
43
in which close relationships with participants exist. Taylor points out how knowledge of
another impacts the perception of them, illustrating this with an example: Taylor’s friend
painted her portrait as a birthday present, to which Taylor subsequently asked herself,
‘why had he chosen to represent me in this way and what part of knowing me resulted
in this particular two-dimensional image?’ (4). Taylor suggests that the level of
knowledge of another, or the level of intimacy of the (pre-existing) relationship, influ-
ences the level of detail the researcher might receive from their participant. Interest-
ingly, Taylor’s discussion of the ethics of friendship in research expands beyond the
ethics of research. Taylor refers to the ‘rules of engagement’ in friendships, which may
at times compromise the research: ‘what you allow yourself to see as a researcher and
what you choose to communicate with outsiders; that is, what you say and what you
do not say’ (13). In other words, as friend-researchers, it is paramount to recognise
and acknowledge when shared information should not be included in the research (13).
Furthermore, intimacy goes both ways, and the ‘friend-informant’ may want to ‘please’
their friend, which is why Taylor cautions ‘against the exclusive use of friend-informants
in social research’ (15).
Taylor’s conception of the intimate insider highlights the complexities of friendship in
research, and equally points out the complexities of research on friendship. This is
precisely the point of departure for this essay: not only does friendship complicate the
research situation, but this ambiguity impacts the participants and their friendships,
too. Because the topic of this study is so personal, and the participation so intimate,
kindness is a central facet of my research relationship to the participants. The (group)
discussions about experiences with the pandemic got increasingly emotional, and the
participants and I often shared experiences of isolation and loneliness. My position as
researcher was not as fixed as I expected it to be. I had to approach each participant
with kindness and compassion, but I also had to extend this kindness to myself. When
participants spoke of experiences that I shared, we began to experience the situation
mutually. In (group) discussions with my friends we tackled topics that we had not dis-
cussed in private conversations before and in (group) discussions with people I had
not met before, we built profound emotional connections. In one case, I subsequently
developed a great friendship with a participant. Going back to Tillmann-Healy, then,
she wrote that ‘friendship as method demands radical reciprocity, a move from study-
ing ‘them’ to studying us’ (Tillmann-Healy, 2003, 735). ‘Studying us’ can take various
forms. For my study it meant that the dynamics between the participants and myself,
as well as my affective responses to the settings and discussions, will be integrated in
my research. ‘Studying us’ also meant that participants were incorporated into the re-
search with an ethic of friendship, that the study design honoured their interests and
vulnerabilities – vulnerabilities that were often exacerbated by the pandemic, as I show
in the following section.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
44
Observations of kindness
Researching friendship and the pandemic during the pandemic demanded an immer-
sive engagement with it, both on my part and for the participants. Not only was my
research setting demarcated by the pandemic restrictions, with many participants only
being able to see each other digitally, but the conflicts and difficulties and opportunities
that arose from the pandemic became central parts of our conversations. The research
was accompanied by the overarching theme of loneliness and isolation; an experience
shared by me and many participants, as transpired in the discussions. Indeed, this
shared experience initiated my thoughts about the impact of my research: the setting
and format of my research provided a space for friends to be in friendship with another,
to do friendship. This is what I propose as one aspect of academic kindness: the pro-
vision of a space for friendships to unfold in times of social distancing. While this was
not the impetus for my research originally, it is the aspect I would like to now highlight.
In what follows, I discuss one specific case, one friendship pair that participated in my
study, based on a transcript of the discussion conducted in May 2021. The dyad, Dafne
and Joanne, have been friends with each other and with me for seven years.
4
In March
2020 they lived together in a shared house, with two other flatmates, in a large UK city.
Most of our conversation for this study reflected on that time. As I will demonstrate in
the next section, the research setting offered a space to discuss difficult topics, and to
explore a conflict they had experienced in the run up to and during the first lockdown.
I have picked out three examples of discussed topics that illustrate the beneficial pro-
spects to their friendship and to them individually.
The first example is a reflection on Joanne’s behaviour towards Dafne before the first
nationwide lockdown in the UK. Joanne had confidence in the political and public health
response to the pandemic and trusted that the newfound coronavirus would be handled
swiftly. Dafne, conversely, was in the process of a medical assessment and unsure if
she qualified as vulnerable to the virus. Dafne had carefully asked Joanne to take pre-
cautions. Joanne recalled Dafne asking, ‘Are you sure it’s a good idea to go to that
gig?’ It took Joanne some more time to realise that, as she said, ‘this [Covid-19] is like
an actual thing that’s not going to go away’. Only later did Joanne understand Dafne’s
vulnerability to the virus and her concerns about infection. During the conversation
Joanne explained that she now understood how she had dismissed Dafne’s concerns,
and that she had not taken the risk seriously. She apologised to Dafne.
The second example is of Dafne reflecting on her relationship to her community in their
city, and her reactions to her friends’ behaviour. Dafne made use of the setting to share
her perspective and her frustration with their community. She spoke about the lack of
solidarity she received from the other two people living in the house, as well as the
larger community and circle of friends, who are politically left wing and for the most
part queer. She explained how disappointed she was to see how quickly her friends
4
All names have been pseudonymised.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
45
abandoned all precautions when the government lifted many restrictions. Supposedly
‘anti-authoritarian’ people began listening to government advice as soon as it fit their
agenda, when in other situations Dafne had known them to be respectful of other’s
boundaries. She expressed frustration because she felt that their solidarity with disa-
bled and chronically ill people was severely lacking.
A third example is of Joanne telling the story of a falling out that occurred between her
and her close friend Anna, one of the other people living in the house. Anna had dis-
respected the boundaries Joanne had set in terms of reducing the risk of an infection
with Covid-19, which Joanne pointed out and asked for her boundaries to be respected.
Anna reacted with anger and did not offer understanding, leading them to cease all
contact. This was described by Joanne as a heart-breaking ‘friendship break-up’.
Dafne, who had already moved out at this point, knew of the situation but had ‘forgotten
how bad it was’.
The first example most clearly demonstrated how they utilised the space to mend their
issues, the second showed how Dafne used the space to express frustration with her
wider community, and the third allowed Joanne to share her experiences after Dafne
had moved out. All three examples show how the two of them utilised this space to air
their grievances, to apologise, and to share their stories with me and each other, illus-
trating the benefits of this research for their friendship with each other, but also for the
friendship between the three of us. To return to the theme of this issue, I retrospectively
consider this situation one of shared kindness. I propose that creating a confidential
space that is solely dedicated to the friendship between participants in a time when
friendship was difficult to do is an act of academic kindness. While the purpose of the
discussion was for my research, with the aim of studying their experiences with friend-
ship during the pandemic and their engagement with the digital space, academic kind-
ness can be understood as its by-product. Dafne expressed that the conversation gave
her a chance to reflect on her friendships and on how they were impacted by the early
phases of the pandemic. She later told me that this conversation was an important step
in processing the pandemic experience. Moreover, for Dafne to express these frustra-
tions felt, to me, like an offer to understand her position better, both as a researcher
and as a friend. I have gained insight not only as researcher but was also privy to topics
that had not been shared with me before, despite regular contact and conversations.
At a later point, Joanne described the conversation as cathartic, which aligned with my
impression of the conversation at the time. Having known that there were issues in the
shared house, which ultimately lead to all of them moving out at different times during
the first lockdown, I invited them to reflect on their experiences which was accepted by
both participants.
While I primarily focus on the academic kindness brought about by the research set-
ting, I suggest, too, that academic kindness in this instance was reciprocal. Their par-
ticipation in my study was a kindness they extended to me; to vulnerably share their
pandemic experiences, their conflicts, and their feelings with me was a kindness. In
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
46
other words, the participants took part in the study out of their own motivation; their
motivations might include contributing to research into queer communities or, one
group expressed, as a past time on a boring lock-down evening. Nonetheless they
were communicating with their friends and allowed me to observe and record them,
which I perceived as a kindness that my study relied on (and that much empirical re-
search relies on). Likewise, in facilitating a conversation that ended up being valuable
to them, I had tried to appreciate and reciprocate this kindness. The impact of research
on the participants, then, can be understood as an act of academic kindness, just as
their participation itself was an act of academic kindness.
Limitations
Of course, academic kindness is not a catch-all fix for research. There are questions
around accountability and vulnerability for doing research with friends. For instance,
Gesa Kirsch argues that participants might feel “misunderstood or betrayed” (Kirsch,
2005: 2163) when their friendly conversation is later analysed – these feelings might
occur despite their informed consent to participation. Kindness can be a way to mitigate
these feelings of betrayal and instead offer appreciation for participant’s vulnerability.
Moreover, Jodie Taylor points out that as intimate insider researchers we might be
privy to information outsiders would not be (Taylor, 2011: 14). This applies to my re-
search and naturally the topic of my research came up time and again in private con-
versations with some of my ‘friend-informants’ (Taylor, 2011), too. Whenever I wanted
to incorporate information from such conversations, I checked with them first. Further-
more, the practice of communicative validation, that is, confirming the researcher’s un-
derstanding of the research conversation with the participants (Degele and Winker,
2007; Ganz and Hausotter, 2020), must guide friendship research in order to uphold
the friendship ‘rules of engagement’ (Taylor, 2011: 13).
The pandemic element complicated the situation further: a lack of spaces for friend-
ships, and queer friendships in particular, to unfold during phases of lockdown (Trott,
2020; Anderson and Knee, 2021) meant that the digital spaces that offered opportuni-
ties for sociality and friendship were more valuable, but also more challenging. The
digital setting acted as a constant reminder of the distance and isolation, while at the
same time providing relief to some of these difficult affects. Many queer spaces were
translated to digital spheres, like digital pride celebrations and queer book clubs. Mo-
hammed Cheded and Alexandros Skandalis explored the affective and corporeal
translations in those types of digital queer spaces (Cheded and Skandalis, 2021). They
showed that digital queer spaces did indeed provide connection and fostered a sense
of community, but ‘also contributed to a sense of frustration at the end of online social
interactions; when closing the laptop, this meant a return to a space that felt terribly
empty’ (345). This risk is there, too, with my friendship research, because the contrast
of the connection experienced during the discussion to the post-discussion solitude
could be challenging. As I invited friends to join me and share their experiences, I
asked them to be vulnerable in front of their friends. In socially distanced times, this
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
47
often meant opening up about the experiences of loneliness, the lack of connection
and the reminiscence and hope for a more connected time (offline). To then release
participants back into their homes in which many of them were isolated, several in
challenging living situations, was hard – for me and participants. I tried to mitigate this
challenge by offering informal conversation after the discussions and inviting partici-
pants to leave or end the discussion when they felt like it. Based on what they shared
in the study, I could assume that not all of my participants were returning to a ‘space
that felt terribly empty’ (Cheded and Skandalis, 2021); some returned to shared and
social living spaces. Retrospectively I would have liked to offer more specific solutions
or support for subsequent feelings of loneliness or distress. My hope for all of them,
though, was that the friends whom they spoke to in the group discussions were friends
whom they could reach out to if they felt lonely after participation. Conducting this re-
search with groups rather than individuals, while limiting the insights into pandemic
experiences to well-connected individuals, did ensure to some extent that participants
had a support network.
Conclusion
In this essay I have sought to demonstrate that research participation can have a pos-
itive impact on participants and carries the potential for kindness. In my study partici-
pants were invited to do friendship in a time where friendship, for many, was restricted
and experiences of loneliness were common. I shared three examples from one con-
versation I facilitated with two friends. The examples illustrated how they utilised the
space to have an open, honest conversation with each other, reflecting on their expe-
riences of the pandemic. Research, I have argued, can have a positive impact on par-
ticipants in addition to the significance of results. Their participation in the study was
an act of kindness on their part, as my study depended on their openness. Moreover,
providing this space for friendship for the participants can be considered an act of kind-
ness, too. This is a conclusion I have only arrived at retrospectively; I did not have
kindness and impact in mind when designing my research. Nonetheless, I find promise
in the concept of kindness when considering the impact of my research. However, the
digital setting can also function as a reminder of the traumatic social distance that char-
acterised the first and second lockdowns. Centring the conversation around friend-
ships, reflecting on what was missed and the conflicts that arose, became at times a
painful reminder of the difficulties of navigating the pandemic. Academic kindness, it
seems, can have ambivalent consequences. I suggest that kindness is an unarticu-
lated premise for Tillman-Healy’s friendship as method. The ethic of friendship de-
scribed by Tillmann-Healy (2003) aims for an emotionally rich research practice. Emo-
tional richness, then, can incorporate the ambivalence of the research impact, that is,
the ambivalent affects that may arise in the research process. I understand Tillmann-
Healy’s approach to be open to ambivalence, which furthermore must be met with
compassion. While the participants might gain something from participation, as Maria
Tomlinson (2021) suggested, they do often offer vulnerability, which must be met with
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
48
kindness, too. The research setting, characterised by ambivalence, requires reciprocity
and care. To me this is what academic kindness embodies.
References
Anderson, A. R. and Knee, E. (2021) ‘Queer Isolation or Queering Isolation? Reflecting upon the
Ramifications of COVID-19 on the Future of Queer Leisure Spaces’, Leisure Sciences, 43(1–
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Bohnsack, R. (2014) ‘Rekonstruktive Sozialforschung : Einführung in qualitative Methoden’. Opladen:
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Cheded, M. and Skandalis, A. (2021) ‘Touch and contact during COVID-19: Insights from queer digital
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pp. 219–245. doi: 10.1177/1077800405284363.
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Hirschauer, S., Hoffmann, A. and Stange, A. (2015) ‘Paarinterviews als teilnehmende Beobachtung:
präsente Abwesende und zuschauende Darsteller/innen im Forschungsgespräch’, Forum
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Kirsch, G. E. (2005) ‘Friendship, Friendliness, and Feminist Fieldwork’, Signs, 30(4), pp. 2163–2172.
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Peterson, Z. D., Vaughan, E. L. and Carver, D. N. (2021) ‘Sexual identity and psychological reactions
to COVID-19.’, Traumatology, 27(1), pp. 6–13. doi: 10.1037/TRM0000283.
Schwarz, C. (2022) Freund:innenschaft als Methode in Corona-Zeiten, blog interdisziplinäre
geschlechterforschung. doi: https://doi.org/10.17185/gender/20220111.
Self, B. (2021) ‘Conducting Interviews During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond’, Forum Qualitative
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Tillmann-Healy, L. M. (2003) ‘Friendship as Method’, Qualitative inquiry, 9(5), pp. 729–749.
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Conversations Across the Medical Humanities. Available at:
https://thepolyphony.org/2021/06/14/research-as-impact-talking-with-teenagers-about-
menstruation/ (Accessed: 7 July 2022).
Trott, B. (2020) ‘Queer Berlin and the Covid-19 crisis: a politics of contact and ethics of care’, A journal
for and about social movements: Movement report, 22(1), pp. 43–53.
Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2021) ‘Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the
COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies’, Media
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Rich, Adrienne. (1977). Claiming an education. Speech delivered at the Convocation of Douglass Col-
lege, 1977.
Roy, Loriene & Cofield, Melanie. (2021). Teaching with the considerate touch: Purposeful kindness.
The Reference Librarian, 62(2), 98-105.
Segal, Lynne. (2017). Gender, power and feminist resistance. In A. Bolsø, S. H. Svendsen Bang, & S.
Sørensen Øyslebø (Eds.), Bodies, symbols and organizational practice (pp. 227- 244). Lon-
don, UK: Routledge.
Shrewsbury, Carolyn. (1987). What is feminist pedagogy? Women's Studies Quarterly 15(3/4), 6-14.
Turner, Bret. (2019). Teaching kindness isn’t enough. Teaching Tolerance, 63. https://www.learning-
forjustice.org/magazine/fall-2019
Tursack, Marilee. (2014). The unexamined life of academic kindness. National Association of Scholars
blog, February 19, 2014. https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/the_unexamined_life_of_aca-
demic_kindness
Vachhani, Sheena. J. & Pullen, Alison. (2019). Ethics, politics and feminist organizing: Writing feminist
infrapolitics and affective solidarity into everyday sexism. Human Relations, 72(1), 23-47.
Valle, Maria Eva. (2002). Antiracist pedagogy and concientización.” In Macdonald A.A., Sánchez-
Casal S. (Eds.) Twenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms. Comparative Feminist Studies Se-
ries. Palgrave Macmillan.
Willis, Michael. (2020). ‘Do to Others as you would have them do to you’: How can editors foster aca-
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can-editors-foster-academic-kindness-in-peer-review
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50
Lisa Scheer
What can academic kindness look like?
Lisa Scheer is a sociologist who works at the University of Graz Compe-
tence Center for University Teaching. There she is concerned with ques-
tions regarding higher education teaching and learning, supporting teach-
ing staff and contributing to organizational development. Her teaching ac-
tivities at Austrian universities concentrate on gender and family/technol-
ogy/body/knowledge as well as social inequality in higher education. She
enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking and paragliding. She is part of the
Queer STS working group.
Comics on possibilities of academic kindness
When I received my colleagues’ call for contributions for this year’s Queer STS forum,
I immediately knew (1) that I would submit something and (2) that this something would
be comics. I find the possibility to contribute in other than the usual written forms very
stimulating and positive. Although I feel very good and safe with written tasks and calls
for papers, I not always feel like writing. And just recently I have started using comics
to deepen student learning. Therefore, I saw the call as an opportunity for me to try out
my comic skills and to check how it feels to process a topic in a visual way.
At first, my thoughts were rather critical. My sarcastic answer to the question “Who are
the ones being able to act kind in academia?” was: Those who can afford it because
they have safe jobs, because they do not have to worry about much in their lives. I saw
academic kindness as some sort of queer-feminist daydream, an unrealistic wish that
mainstream academia would dismiss with the blink of an eye. But when I researched
academic kindness as inspiration for my comics, my perspective changed. I found so
many suggestions that I took for decent human behaving, for being a good colleague
or teacher, which led me to rethink my understanding of academic kindness. I now
believe that everyone in academia can be kind without much effort as the range spans
from appreciating one another to being a good mentor. Inspired by the website
academickindness.tumblr.com hosted by Rabia Gregory (https://www.insidehigh-
ered.com/news/2014/01/09/blog-aims-normalize-kindness-academe) as well as
Philipp Schulz’ activities (https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/toolbox/2020/03/05/academic-kind-
ness) I created five comics on the website canva.com which are titled
(1) Academic Kindness 1
(2) Academic Kindness 2
(3) Being kind and caring
(4) Caring Activity Collection
(5) Thanking and appreciating
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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In different styles they visualise what academic kindness can be, e.g. sending thank-
you emails to authors whose articles were read in class, providing spaces such as
gardens or balcony’s to colleagues, crafting for each other, offering help or project
hours, celebrating colleagues’ success, caring for others as in listening to their needs
and worries, connecting to others, building relationships that are not solely based on
work issues, giving constructive feedback, being an ally and being a good team leader
which includes valuing the opinions and knowledge of others. Looking back now,
maybe the forum call already was academic kindness – offering a wide range of for-
mats to creatively discuss, illuminate and analyse a topic?
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Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
55
Kris De Welde
Minding and Mending the Gap between Aca-
demic Kindness and Academic Justice
Kris is Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Pro-
fessor of Sociology at the College of Charleston, SC. Her scholarship fo-
cuses on academic justice, institutional change for intersectional equity,
and feminist leadership. She is also an impassioned pedagogue, hoping
to dismantle harmful systems of teaching and learning one course at a
time.
Abstract
As a scholar of academic justice, feminist leadership, and organizational change for
intersectional equity, “queer feminist [academic] interventions” are at the center of my
research and my purpose as an educator-scholar-activist. As someone steeped in the
experiences of, research in, and support systems for marginalized and minoritized
scholars, the possibilities afforded by “academic kindness” are as alluring as they are
needed. What are ways that academic kindness can serve as queer feminist interven-
tion, moving beyond isolated, atomized acts of individual-level interaction? Can kind-
ness operate as a strategy alongside subversion, fugitivity, resistance and transfor-
mation? Or is kindness simply a masquerading tool of the very oppressions it aims to
alleviate? Gathering insights from my research, this paper explores the tensions inher-
ent at the intersections of academic justice and academic kindness. I question whether
kindness can be situated meaningfully as a strategy in institutional justice work that is
often predicated on oppositional critique, refusal, and resistance. I conclude with a
tentative proposal for how kindness and justice might be compatible in academic life.
Key words
Academic kindness, academic justice, pedagogy, leadership
Overture
This paper is a gathering of insights, an incomplete collection of considerations, a
snapshot in the evolution of my theorizing, and if I am successful, a contribution to the
ongoing dialogue about academic kindness, “unsolicited kindness, unexpected good-
will, and excessive generosity in academia” (Gregory, 2014). In the spirit of subverting
the status quo that academic kindness proposes, this is not a traditional academic
paper, though it is grounded in empirical research and generative of theoretical ideas.
It is “a cluster of thoughts in development” (brown, 2017, p. 3) with a sharp and critical
analysis.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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I question whether queer feminist interventions that happen at the interpersonal level
merely offer moments of relief or respite, create space for breathing and perhaps even
some healing, or do these interventions actually shift patterns of oppressive systems?
Is academic kindness an “antidote” (Jauk, Thaler, & Wicher, 2021) that offers tempo-
rary respite, or can it serve as a cure? Can academic kindness be situated meaningfully
as a strategy in institutional justice work if it is practised separately from oppositional
critique or resistance? In grappling with these questions, I hope to generate offerings
for how kindness and justice can be partners in the struggle for more equitable aca-
demic institutions, processes, policies, cultures, and interactions.
As a matter of disclosure, my “attachments” (referencing Rita Felski in Gutkin, 2020)
are to institutional transformation for academic justice over the ambient, interactional,
micro-level effects of kindness. The notion of academic justice emerges explicitly from
a critical paradigm intended to identify and address injustice in academia (e.g., De
Welde, 2010, De Welde & Stepnick, 2007, 2008, 2014, De Welde, Ferber & Stepnick,
2014). I am a feminist sociologist who studies organizational change and brings to the
questions above an understanding that transformation in academia requires “multiple
levers at multiple levels” (Austin, 1998; Laursen, 2019; Laursen & Austin, 2020). While
I don’t reject the notion of academic kindness, I am a bit sceptical of it as a change
strategy, particularly where institutions with long-standing academic practices are con-
cerned.
As a strategy for working through my own scepticism as well as possibilities of this
concept, I will first explore a cluster of thoughts about the potentiality and necessity of
kindness in academic life, followed by a second cluster that identifies and traverses
the gap between kindness and justice, finally ending with a cluster of ideas about how
to mend that gap.
Cluster One: The potentiality and necessity of Academic Kindness
Citing Bourdieu, Burton (2021) suggests that “unkindness becomes part of the ‘rules
of the game’…and [is] inculcated into the academic habitus” (p. 24), acutely so in the
neoliberal academic context.
1
This necessitates interventions to both expose this col-
lective unkind habitus and change the dispositions that comprise it. Queer-feminist in-
tervention can be a generative framework for such a challenge, and academic kind-
ness may serve as a strategy or approach in the subversion. Willis (2020) traces the
inception of “academic kindness” as a concept to Amber Davis (2014) who character-
ized it as “academics showing a bit of appreciation and sharing small, important, mo-
ments of kindness” (par. 10). In that same year, Rabia Gregory launched a Tumblr
blog, Academic Kindness, that serves as a repository of kind acts experienced by ac-
ademics. Intentionally subversive, the site aims to “document that generosity and com-
1
Bourdieu (1990) offers the concept of habitus as capturing internalized systems of enduring structures, dispositions, and conditions that organize practices
and discourses in a more or less unconscious manner. Habitus is a way of being that is neither fully determined, as in socially constructed, nor fully
determining, as in by free will. It is open to change through experiences that may modify its structures.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
57
passion are normative in academia” (Tursack, 2014). Willis (2020) encouraged “kind-
ness” specifically in peer review and the benefits of such behaviors for early career
researchers. They
2
acknowledge the toxic, harmful, and detrimental aspects of aca-
demia and offer approaches for relief through supportive, useful, clear, timely, and em-
pathic peer review processes. In so keeping, Jauk, Thaler and Wicher took up “aca-
demic kindness” in 2020 to describe their work culture in the Queer-Feminist Science
and Technology Studies Forum during the acute COVID-19 period. They described it
as one that invited expansive and creative participation in the published forum, sup-
ported by “critical friends” who would “mutually mentor” in the peer-review process.
Hulme and Locke (2020) suggest that kindness can serve as intervention into toxic
institutional cultures if considered as a criterion for hiring, promotion and advancement:
“We suggest that promoting academics to the professoriate who embody the
values of inclusion, collegiality, and caring, often located within those on educa-
tional and practitioner-based careers, can help to change the culture of aca-
demia, and bring kindness, instead of toxicity, to the fore. Those who achieve
promotion via these routes will then be available to act as role models, and, as
well as helping other aspiring professors to understand the ambiguity of promo-
tion criteria and facilitate the progression of more minoritised groups, such as
women and BAME [Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic] individuals” (par. 6).
They connote the possibility of a reverberating culture shift if entry into and success in
the professoriate are guided by kindness. Their vision suggests the necessity of aca-
demic kindness for 21st century higher education, one that creates “a virtuous circle in
which members who achieve professorship continue to contribute and provide support
to the next generation of professors” (Hulme & Locke, 2020, par. 4). This of course
would extend to structurally vulnerable institutional members such as non-tenure track
and part-time faculty, contingent and contracted staff, graduate student and postdoc-
toral employees.
These scholars offer behaviors and dispositions that challenge academic spaces typi-
fied by toxicity, hyper-individualism, competitiveness, and quantification, which invite
stress, exhaustion, burnout, demoralization, shame and other hallmarks of neoliberal
workspaces. While some celebrate micro-interactions that are predicated on kindness,
others conjure alternative, even subversive approaches to academic rhythms and
practices. It is these latter understandings of “academic kindness” that I believe offer
promise for deep and lasting change.
Examples of potentiality
Example one: I draw on my collaborative, interview-based research on academic ad-
ministrators who self-identify as feminist to explore the kinds of “levers for change” that
hold potential for enduring shifts in academic cultures and processes. In our research
2
I opt for gender-neutral pronouns as an alternative to making assumptions about gender identity based on others’ names.
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
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(De Welde & Ollilainen, 2022, De Welde, Ollilainen & Solomon, 2018, 2019) we iden-
tified values that frame respondents’ feminist leadership practices to be: transparency,
collaboration, inclusivity, and empowering others. These can be read as queer-feminist
interventions in neoliberal academic contexts for their subversive intent to flatten hier-
archies and share power. The behaviors that emerged from these values also could
be read as acts of kindness given their overall generosity, benevolence, or goodwill.
For example, a cornerstone feminist value for respondents in our study was inclusivity,
which manifested in multifaceted ways, often depending on the institutional positional-
ity of the feminist leader. Across many respondents, inclusivity centered on access to
higher education for individuals who historically have been disenfranchised or ex-
cluded; recruiting, hiring and supporting diverse faculty and administrative workforces;
openness to non-traditional ideas and knowledge production; and authentically listen-
ing to others’ concerns (whether students, faculty, or staff). In practice, these values
translate into micro-, mezzo-, and macro-levels: from valuing a non-tenure track faculty
member’s ideas in a department meeting (micro), to equitizing workload in a depart-
ment (mezzo) or transforming institutional Title IX processes to be more explicitly at-
tentive to racial justice (macro). Although I am more excited about the transformative
potential of these actions on the cultures and structures of academic life, of course
individual acts of kindness are needed too.
Example two: Many instructional faculty across the world embraced academic kind-
ness in pedagogical strategies during the acute period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
These “pandemic pedagogies” were radically kind, and are producing new scholarship
on the pedagogy of kindness (e.g., Rawle, 2021, Roy & Cofield, 2021).
3
Coinciding
with the beginning of COVID-19 disruptions in the early months of 2020, the U.S. ex-
perienced acute social uprisings related to systemic racism (or more specifically, the
pandemic of state-sanctioned violence and death in Black and Brown communities,
most notably the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis). Intensified attention to
trauma-informed approaches to teaching (e.g., Davidson, 2017, Imad, 2020) called on
instructional faculty to practice grace (Else-Quest, Sathay & Hogan, 2022) kindness
(Denial, 2019), understanding, compassion, and flexibility, recognizing that status quo
approaches would exacerbate the stress, fatigue, and mental health issues that under-
graduate students in particular were navigating. Instead, faculty were encouraged to
essentially be kind to their students by revising expectations, eliminating unnecessary
content and assignments, creating space for whole, messy selves to coexist with/in our
courses, and sharing our own personal struggles with students as a way of connecting
with them. Catherine Denial (2019) simplifies and clarifies that kindness in pedagogy
is “believing people and believing in people” (par. 8, original emphasis). As an exten-
sion of this, academic institutions across the country suspended traditional, competi-
tive-based and hierarchical grading schemes for basic – and far more humane –
pass/no pass options. While interactional kindness was unequivocally healing during
3
For earlier works on the intersections of pedagogy and kindness see for example Clegg & Rowland (2010), Denial (2019), and Magnet, Mason & Trevenen
(2016).
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a time of critical damage to our social institutions, the structural changes that we made
in our courses and in our institutions to benefit all students (even ourselves) are where
we can see the potentiality of academic kindness as queer-feminist intervention. The
upending of long-standing and harmful rules, expectations, even grades, offer promise
for a more kind, and just, higher education. These changes also underscore the ne-
cessity of such transformations.
Cluster Two: Minding the Gap
4
The compelling imagining of kindness in academia – as contrast to unkind habitus –
may be enough to justify its necessity, though the brief examples above offer concrete
instances of its potential to enact equity and justice. And yet, there is a gap between
quotidian acts of kindness and systemic justice that requires examination. By way of
example we can refer to Willis (2020), who claims that kindness (in peer review spe-
cifically) is an end in itself. That is, kindness does not necessarily need to engage with
questions of fairness, equity, inclusion, or justice and can instead possibly have “other
dividends” (par. 18) and reverberating effects. Practices to interject kindness into peer
review, in keeping with this example, do little to fundamentally challenge and upend
the “publish or perish” system many of us have come to accept as inevitable and that
lead to the attrition of BIPOC, interdisciplinary, and community-oriented scholars who
tend to experience diminished success, even knowledge-based violence, in peer-re-
view processes and in the academic reward system (e.g., Katuna, 2014; Hurtado &
Sharkness, 2008; National Academies of Science, 2005). This positions academic
kindness as a strategy that may not have the transformative possibilities it portends to.
For instance, as long as someone being evaluated unfairly or denied a tenure-track
position is treated kindly in the process – with clear guidelines, considerate communi-
cation, and empathy – the implicit (or explicit) bias and discrimination of that very pro-
cess does not need to be interrogated. Kindness may ease the sting, but it is not a
substitute for equity, fairness, or justice in academic life. As argued by Denial (2019),
“Kindness can be a band aid we’re urged to plaster over deep fissures in our institu-
tions, wielded as a weapon instead of as a balm” (par. 6)
We also should engage with critiques of academic kindness as a possible tool of the
neoliberal university ethos (e.g., Burton, 2021). I am persuaded by Burton especially
that kindness serves as a “control mechanism” of the neoliberal university as a well-
ness or well-being strategy intended to adapt (or contort?) the individual to its de-
mands. Burton also notes that in this context “the project of academic kindness ap-
pears as a collective goal for individual wellbeing rather than a collective practice of
shared humanity and personhood” (p. 29, original emphasis).
A theory of systemic change that is grounded in individual consciousness or acts has
the very real potential to fall short of any sort of transformative, institutionalized, sus-
tained move toward justice. As Jack Halberstam writes in the foreword for Harney and
4
Ahmed (2017) argues that diversity workers often “live in this gap between words and deeds of an institution, trying to make those institutions catch up with
the words they send out” (p. 107) as substitutes for the actual work of academic justice. I’m loosely drawing from her imperative to “mind the gap.”
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Moten’s, The Undercommons, “Our goal…is not to end the troubles but to end the
world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed” (2013,
p. 9). Academic kindness as antidote may ease troubles, and may even temporarily
interrupt them, but it cannot end the troubles, much less the world that created them.
No antidote can be fully effective if the poison consistently and persistently invades
and pervades the system, if the poison is systemic and systematic, so too must be its
antidotes. We know this from studies of organizational change: we cannot take individ-
ualist approaches to effect system-wide change. If historical and cultural hierarchies
are inscribed onto bureaucratic structures, practices, and interactions, then any efforts
to resist, refuse, or transform those hierarchies must also be enacted at those levels.
Another feature of the gap is the relationship of kindness to power and privilege: who
are the givers and receivers of kindness? Givers of kindness have a responsibility to
understand and practice “consensual allyship” (Hunt, 2013), wherein what is needed
by the “receivers” is centered instead of “a wholly self-generated approach that might
be at odds with and in fact undermine [the receivers of allyship]” (Fletcher, 2015, p.
183).
5
And if the receivers are those who are structurally vulnerable or socially minor-
itized, do they then become the cause of their own plight if they reject the kindness?
In Ahmed’s words, “Is it the ones who do not receive that [kind] gesture as a gesture
of goodwill who would be deemed to cause the breakage?” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 178).
Who is expected to be kind or receive kindness, and how are those expectations ra-
cialized and gendered? We should be wary of how the expectations for BIPOC faculty,
staff or students to enact or (especially) receive kindness, reify the “imperialist white-
supremacist capitalist [hetero]patriarch[al]” (hooks 1984) academic habitus. Kindness
and expected reciprocity or gratitude may collude with hegemonic norms in ways that
are currently uninterrogated.
Cluster Three: Mending the gap
To mend these gaps, I extend Burton’s (2021) premise that “Kindness…is an ambiva-
lent and mercurial concept, which can be used to oppress, to uphold dominant ideol-
ogy, to co-opt citizens into dominant power, and also to refuse, challenge, and provide
dispositions and affects able to effect change” (p. 32, emphasis added). I propose that
we (re)envision academic kindness as collective practice in queer-feminist solidarity
against oppression and injustice. Specifically, how can we academics practice these
often small, barely visible, acts of humanity as affects of resistance, attentive to while
centering equity, justice, and belonging? Burton suggests “That this iteration of kind-
ness is underpinned by a collegiality which is vigilant about power and power relations;
it refuses damaging and oppressive hierarchies, challenges exclusionary positions and
values, and acts ethically to counter or alleviate the harms and violences of oppressive
power” (p. 30). This is not a kindness that is an end in itself. Rather, it is a kindness
5
The concept of “consensual allyship” is attributed to Jessica Danforth Yee in a 2011 Twitter feed.
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that is aimed directly at challenging and dismantling the harmful systems, policies,
practices, cultures and interactions that are unjust.
Above I argued that systemic change cannot be accomplished through individual acts.
Notwithstanding, organizational transformation can (and does) happen through people
and their actions if those individuals have as their end goal a broader purpose for jus-
tice and equity. While there are no substitutes for the work of academic justice, if aca-
demic kindness is enacted as a counter-hegemonic praxis that “works against institu-
tional norms and values,” under the “illusion of working with” them, then “pass[ing] as
willing in order to be willful” aligns academic kindness with academic justice. (Ahmed
2017, p. 101) In this way, the former can be a strategy for the latter, and an ethic of
solidarity (Fraser, 1986), can serve as a compass.
Example one: Solidarity can be an antidote against neoliberalism’s isolating and indi-
vidualizing tendencies (Vachhani and Pullen, 2019), and move us toward a “shared
responsibility for the lives of others…[in] resistance against socio-economic inequali-
ties and patriarchal power…” (Segal 2017, p. 228). We see this in our study of feminist
administrators’ praxis as solidarity (De Welde et al., 2018, 2019), which offers concrete
examples of what I here am proposing as oppositional and justice-oriented kindness.
While micro-level kindnesses enacted by these administrators might have a lasting
positive impact on an individual, it was the initiatives and policies for which these lead-
ers advocated on behalf of others that institutionalized feminist and justice-oriented
ideals. The interstitial spaces between kindness and justice in academic settings are
where we find generative possibilities for closing the gap through solidary acts.
Academic habitus is constituted through interactions that are patterned, learned, prac-
ticed and reinforced throughout our careers. The more successful we are in academia,
the stronger our “culture of acceptance” becomes (Willis, 2020) and the more likely we
are to replicate learned patterns, even if they are harmful (to ourselves and others).
Academic cultures thus need queer-feminist intervention to interrupt the oppressive
interactions, processes, and policies it generates. Almost all the feminist administrators
in our study offered examples of how they had intervened in the oft unjust academic
reward system (primarily tenure and promotion cases). In one example, a department
head confronted a (man) “bully” intending to derail an early tenure decision for a
woman assistant professor based on false information. Ultimately, our respondent was
successful and so was the (early) tenure candidate. This interaction, while seemingly
only impacting one scholar, was part of a suite of interventions our respondents re-
ported making, including contextualizing “gaps” in C.V.s for those who “stopped the
clock” for child/eldercare, or biased teaching evaluations for faculty of color. These
examples, occurring at the interpersonal level, offer evidence of how the daily work of
feminist administrators’ solidary actions are guided by “a framework for detecting gen-
dered micro-politics and observing how power relations operate through daily interac-
tions” (De Welde et al. 2019, p. 8). As such, these actions often catalyzed policy revi-
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
62
sions and institutionalized process changes. In effect, a feminist lens helps self-identi-
fied feminist administrators link the micro situations with the macro-level policies and
processes in pursuit of fostering social justice through lasting change.
Example two: Similarly with pedagogies, feminist (hooks, 1994, 2003, Shrewsbury,
1997, Valle, 2002), abolitionist (Love, 2019), critical, and engaged (hooks, 1994,
Kinlock et al., 2021) pedagogies are often subversive to the status quo in classrooms,
disciplines, and institutions. Practitioners of these pedagogies encourage critique, flat-
ten hierarchies, invite students to “claim their education” (Rich, 1977), and for both
faculty and students to take risks (hooks, 1994). Rule-breaking (or bending), such as
practicing un-grading or prioritizing community-engaged projects over traditional forms
of evaluation are examples of “education as the practice of freedom” (hooks, 1994) as
students are encouraged to bring their whole selves, including families and communi-
ties, into their work rather than be hyper focused on achieving arbitrary standards and
predetermined learning outcomes (see Kinloch et al., 2021). Catherine Denial (2019)
encourages us to see these as acts of kindness, extending compassion and care into
our interactions with students as those that can transcend the micro-level interactional
space to challenge neoliberal logics: “To extend kindness means recognizing that our
students possess innate humanity, which directly undermines the transactional educa-
tional model to which too many of our institutions lean, if not cleave” (par. 16). I believe
that solidarity with students with/in our pedagogies and beyond is one approach to
mend the gap.
To keep things real, as much as I subscribe to these ideas and practice them in my
classrooms through critical, abolitionist, and liberatory pedagogies, I am also not naïve
to think that when students and I share a course that is premised on kindness and
these pedagogical frameworks, that the barrage of injustices they face elsewhere are
somehow alleviated in more than a transitory way. In order to mend the gap between
kindness and justice in our pedagogies, we must be willing to engage with the reality
that “The harm done by long-term exposure to injustice…calls for more than a simple
understanding of kindness. It demands that kindness be interwoven with substantial
notions of true justice” (Turner 2019, p. 42). In this way, I advocate for students when
they are not in the room, challenge colleagues when they say that students are “lazy”
or “unprepared for college work,” reject the blind use of data analytics to predict their
success, or otherwise try to extend my solidarity with students into institutional spaces
beyond the classroom.
Final thoughts
Framing academic kindness as “unexpected goodwill, and excessive generosity” is
akin to charity. Kindness helps another, it makes legible the violence experienced by
those who may be structurally or otherwise vulnerable and extends compassion and
consideration to them (and to ourselves). We all need more of this. But I hope I have
offered a sufficient argument that academic kindness is lacking when not guided by or
informed by academic justice. The bridge that may mend the gap between these is one
Queer-Feminist Science & Technology Studies Forum – Volume 7, December 2022
63
where solidarity, which requires collective action to address injustice, drives acts of
kindness. Jauk, Thaler and Wicher (2021) frame academic kindness as an academic
mutual aid strategy, which I interpret as invoking a form of solidarity, one where we
engage in justice-oriented kindness with no need for personal gain, no accountability
from the receiver, no expectation of reciprocity. I think this is what we need to be fo-
cused on in building a kinder academy.
And yet, we should be mindful of a solidarity that is premised on assumed shared
experiences that produce a perverse empathy, re-inscribing power relations (De Welde
et al., 2019, Pedwell, 2012). “Passive empathy” is a kindness that is unmoored from
understanding our own responsibility in and complicity with historical and social condi-
tions. It is a form of charity, even pity, that can dislocate us from the very systems that
are producing the “troubles.” Instead, we need what Nemeth and collaborators (2021)
call “catalytic empathy,” which emerges from felt responsibility, from a “feeling with
others [that] is rooted in equity, ethics, and justice” (Kinloch et al., 2021, p. 68). This is
a queer-feminist, kind, and justice-oriented solidarity that may reflect shared identities
but is intentional to transcend them (e.g., Mohanty, 2003).
Finally, quotidian acts of kindness are not in themselves justice work, and the latter are
what is required for transformation. Acts of kindness are individual, interactional, at the
micro-level. Justice work is collective, aimed at institutions, predicated on coalitions,
resistance and refusal. There is a gap between these, and as a scholar of academic
justice, I am uneasy with the normalization of academic kindness in the absence of
also attending to the unjust systems and processes in which these atomized acts oc-
cur. And, academic kindness has the very real potential to be coopted, marketized,
and imbricated into institutional power dynamics (Burton, 2021), and as a form of labor,
to be coerced. Academic kindness should be a “refusal of the academy of misery”
(Halberstam, 2013, p. 10). In sum, coupled with an ethos and praxis of solidarity toward
academic justice, kindness in the context of our academic professional lives can be a
form of queer worldmaking that may just be irresistible.
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