ABSTRACT
The pandemic has revealed the need to position compassion and (self-)care at the heart of what we do as educators, leaders, and researchers in higher education. As research collaborators, two women working in academia, one located in Australia and the other in New Zealand, we have found we have been able to connect more, reflect with each other and our colleagues, and embrace a common humanity that has enabled the harnessing of kindness, deep thinking, and expression of authentic self. We draw on a metalogue emergent methodology in this chapter and reconstruct our understanding of working together at this time of the pandemic where the place of belonging has enabled us to interrupt and reinterpret the halting of our collective lives and traditional ways of working that have been passed down to us. We view the pandemic as a catalyst for caring for self and one another, and in this way we are positioning our individual, collective and systematic conversations about wellbeing as integral to who we are.
