ABSTRACT

Self-care involves taking action to support, protect or maintain wellbeing. Relationships have a significant influence on these acts of self-care and one’s sense of wellbeing. Relationships are fundamental to individual meaning-making and crucial to the world of academia.

In this edited collection, authors navigate how they view relationships as a crucial part of their wellbeing and acts of self-care, exploring the "I", "We", and "Us" at the centre of self-care and wellbeing embodiment. Each chapter unpacks this idea in varying ways that demonstrate that relationships are a fundamental element of both work and personal life and how they intersect with wellbeing. The authors present critical discussion through visual narratives, lived experiences, and strategies that highlight how relationships, seeking social support, scaffolding opportunities to learn with and from each other, and changes in practise become acts of self-care individually and collectively.  

There has arguably never been a more important time to raise awareness of self-care and wellbeing as central to the nature of work in higher education. Healthy Relationships in Higher Education: Promoting Wellbeing Across Academia highlights new ways of working in higher education that disrupt current tensions that neglect wellbeing and will be of interest to anyone working in this environment.

 

section Section 1|65 pages

The intertwined relationship between us, we and I

section Section 2|66 pages

Fostering connections

chapter Chapter 6|13 pages

Building belonging

A grassroots peer-support network for academic women

chapter Chapter 7|15 pages

Alamus

Singing together for self-care and wellbeing within higher education context

chapter Chapter 8|12 pages

Seeing past the mask

Rejuvenating academia through art based self-care

chapter Chapter 9|13 pages

Creating care-full conditions is institutional work

Research developers as campus earthworms

chapter Chapter 10|11 pages

Table chats

Research relations and the impact on our wellbeing as academics

section Section 3|67 pages

Relationship with self

chapter Chapter 11|14 pages

From survival to self-care

Performative professionalism and the self in the neoliberal university

chapter Chapter 12|13 pages

Lessons from the trickster

Be present. Be empathetic. (Be love). Be playful.

chapter Chapter 14|12 pages

Recovering care for past publications

An exercise in vocation

chapter Chapter 15|13 pages

Authenticity and wellbeing in neoliberal times

Imagining alternatives