ABSTRACT
We are three female scholars from diverse social-cultural locations who have an established history in participating in graduate education. In this chapter, we explore self-care within graduate education and argue for the inclusion of communal care practices to support wellbeing. We position community building as a communal care practice that extends traditional notions of self-care. We adopt reflexive ethnography to unpack our subjective experiences of wellbeing, including those incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. We utilize Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of human development to deconstruct our sense of belonging and efforts to build community within academia, reflecting on resulting impacts on wellbeing. Specifically, we describe and contrast our efforts to create and sustain scholarly communities throughout our experiences as graduate students and early-career scholars. We acknowledge the impacts of these earlier experiences on our current sense of community and our preferred ways of enacting our roles as scholars and mentors within graduate education. We identify microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem factors that facilitated or impeded our efforts to build community in the context of our social-cultural locations as faculty. We conclude with recommendations for senior administrators and other leaders to support community building as communal care within graduate education.
