(Re)discovering connection and community: A call to move beyond the ‘normalization of disconnection’

Abstract

Look within. Look around. Reflect upon your connections with others who shape, and share, the spaces and places of your lived experience. For so many of us, when we look deeply and openly into our academic environments, we see and feel disconnection. In this provocation essay, we vulnerably share about our own disconnected experiences as we simultaneously invite others to critically reflect upon the conscious and unconscious ways in which we reinforce the ‘normalization of disconnection’ in our lives. Our hope is to inspire radical and intentional shifts into spaces and places within which we stand together, as a community grounded in care and solidarity, dropping stones of hope to create ripple effects of (re)connection and repair.

Disconnection abounds. We live within it

Here, in this provocation essay, we sit together with you, the reader, on a collaborative journey of reflection and discovery, sharing our story. It is a story of disconnection and (re)connection. It is woven of our lived experiences, individually and collectively, as we unexpectedly and yet intimately set out on a journey which pushed us to expose our frailties and nurture our strengths. Together, we blended our identities as scholars, educators, partners, parents, friends, community members, citizens, and humans. We share this with you, openly embracing our fear, exhaustion, and the realization that we are forever changed by trauma, as we know many of you have experienced in your own lives as well.

To share our journey requires us to be open, vulnerable, aware, and engaged, not only with each other, but also with you. To do this, we draw strength from the fact that at our cores we are all homines curans – a caring people (Tronto, 2017). As such, there is meaning in our words and an innate power to our sharing them. We welcome you into our lives, with the caveat that what we share comes from a place of deep introspection, rawness, pain, and beauty. Ours is a story of loss, trauma, fear, and isolation. It is also a story of generativity, kindness, collaboration, and love. Here, we invite you to consider the disconnection in your own lives as you briefly journey through ours. We share our story, with a radical openness and acknowledgement that the way in which we are telling it has been shaped – nurtured thoughtfully and lovingly – by the reviewers who encouraged us from afar, forever embedded into our story and woven throughout the fabric of our collaborative experience (Dyer at al., 2024).

To fully enmesh you in our story, we begin this provocation with two poems we wrote as we reflected on our experiences of disconnection. Our goal is to harness the power and potential of using poetic inquiry to communicate parallax, thus encouraging engagement and understanding through exposure to others’ perspectives (Cooms and Saunders, 2024). We introduce and contextualize our poems by writing in the third person. We chose to do this because they were written separately by two of our three co-authors, and so we will step outside of them to share them with you.

The first is a poem that was written by one of our authors who lives in Australia and is a cancer survivor. She underwent 11 years of an intensely debilitating treatment regimen for a rare and aggressive cancer which included seven major surgeries, ongoing challenges related to compromised cognitive and physical abilities, and a life that was completely different than the one she had known prior to her diagnosis. Her treatment necessitated periods of complete disconnection and isolation because of her severely immunocompromised state. The protocol that so many of us incorporated into our lives when COVID-19 changed the world – wearing masks, sanitizing our hands, maintaining strict distances from others – was something she had been living with every day for almost a decade at that point. It was a chapter of almost complete disconnection she had forced herself to embrace to stay alive. As part of the context for this poem, this author is a self-described wholehearted ‘hugger’ of others, drawing energy, generativity, and life-affirming happiness from touch and physical connection, which meant that 11 years of living without it was a particularly challenging and isolating experience for her.

In August of 2022, after 11 years of living in a physically debilitated yet immensely grateful (to still be alive) state, having watched her children grow into late-stage teenagers, she collectively decided, with her oncologist, children, and husband, that it was time to stop treatment. She was alive. She was an outlier who had beaten the very slim odds she had been given. She had seen so many lives lost to cancer during her time in treatment, many of them children whose families would live forever with an irreparable hole in their hearts. She knew that every parent and carer she met would have traded places with their young loved one in a heartbeat, watching, in many ways helpless, as their children endured unimaginable trauma, disconnection, and pain. It is in this space that our author now lives – one filled with gratitude not only to be alive, but also, and in many ways more saliently, that she was the one in treatment, not her children. There is no doubt in her mind that every day is a gift, every hug holds meaning, every smile is brighter than the sun. It is in this space of pure gratitude that she went back to work in late 2022, carried by an immense longing for connection, collaboration, and meaning in a profession she had loved for so long. Here is her reflection about re-entering academia following her cancer treatment and the effects of the global pandemic:

   The Experience of Disconnection

Disconnection is now. It was then. May it not be forever.

  Like a darkness that spreads, blocking out the light.

   We were wounded and embraced it as our salve.

We wore masks, sanitised our hands, and stayed away from each other.

 Everyone was afraid, always looking down. Eyes averted.

  If there were smiles, no one saw them.

 There was no touch, no warmth, no connection.

   Only closed doors and empty spaces.

 We shook hands then immediately sanitised. We washed to erase others.

Moments of physical connection transformed into something dirty, wrong, cold.

   An absence of togetherness filled the air.

 We see it now. The intense sadness and longing within us.

  We continue to wear masks eyes can’t perceive.

   We are confined by invisible walls.

   The light of our connectedness is gone.

 The darkness that seeped in, slowly infected us like a virus.

We stood by, asleep and yet awake, aware and yet submissive.

 We nurtured and fed this normalization of disconnection.

  And now it lives within us. It is a part of who we are.

  And yet, there is hope. It is a glimmer in the darkness.

   A possibility of renewed connectedness.

 It manifests as a light, a beacon, a guiding star.

   It promises to nourish and heal us.

 Through warmth, care, and closeness, we will find it.

  Or we will atrophy through isolation and solitude.

   Forever disconnected and alone.

The poem above speaks to one experience of disconnection. For the other two authors of this provocation, their experiences hold emotional strands of similarity yet are vastly different in context. Their lives were changed forever on 24 February 2022. They have been living through the intense and ongoing war in Ukraine, struggling to survive every day in a deeply fractured space with no end to the war in sight. They wake each day with endless pressure, worry, fatigue, stress, fear, and longing. Each time they teach, they have to be ready to stop their class due to an air raid alert and move with their students to a bomb shelter where they will continue to teach. If there are numerous other large classes running near theirs, the shelters will fill too quickly, yet they must keep everyone safe. The pressure is enormous and unrelenting. The emotional toll it takes is beyond words. Everyone and everything in their lives has been forever touched by war. They fight for their country, their culture, their history, their lives. They feel as if their country is bleeding, and they long for the day when they can stand together as a unified Ukraine which has regained just peace. Only at that point will they fully be able to mourn their losses and focus their depleted energy on rebuilding themselves and their country. Through all of this, they experience an intense and growing connection with each other, and yet those outside of Ukraine feel further and further away, growing more and more disconnected as every day passes. They feel as if the rest of the world is standing by watching. And they long, deeply, for (re)connection with the world they feel increasingly isolated from.

Here is a reflection as one of the two Ukrainian authors considers her lived experience within war:

    People Cling To Each Other

names torn apart by a rocket–will they come together?

    with all the broken bones

 it crumbles from tenderness and caresses the poor flesh

 with all the maimed insides, with all that’s left of oneself

with every scar on the cheeks, with every curve of the body

     to lean on

  why is that half-step distance like kilometers?

   why is that moment always so not eternal?

     a human holds to another

 the granite between the ribs freezes anxiously

all anger and hatred, all pain and sorrow, finally

    envelop and embrace, hear and see

 how to squeeze out the person that has died within?

 how to lean with weakened hands against the wounds?

     to outlive

can one really find solace in the dark darkness next to someone else?

   how to grasp the invisible with clenched fists?

    they embrace, cling to, and hold each other

   they came to where everything hurts and howls

   there are so many crosses behind their shoulders

    that even You are ashamed to stand with yours

     grain by grain

     entirely people broken

     reunite

     sculpt

     among themselves

     You

Here we reconnect with you, the reader, as you join us on our journey, and will write again using our first person voice. As our two poems and our shared backgrounds illustrate, we have each lived through periods within which we experienced intense feelings of disconnection, as we imagine many of you have also. Disconnection comes from so many places and spaces including health issues (both physical and mental), deeply felt losses (of loved ones, friendships, jobs, security, abilities, and time), situational change (natural disasters, environmental issues, political, social, cultural, and economic volatility), situations stemming from hate and violence (e.g. war, armed conflict, domestic violence, abuse, human trafficking, and genocide), and so many others with which we have yet to individually, and bravely, expose to ourselves and each other as we take gentle steps towards a collective journey of processing, care, and connection.

For those of us who experience disconnection in our lives from any of the above causes or others we have not included here, there is, also, an inextricably intertwined processing of emotions, like hope and despair, that takes place on our journeys with a resultant desire to establish and nurture collective and collaborative experiences (Gavin et al., 2023; Korber et al., 2023; Skilling et al., 2023). Stated simply, we need each other. We need connection. And that is what drives the underlying question for our provocation essay:

How can we nurture connection and community in our lives as academics?

Our goal, through these words and in this privileged moment we share with you, is to encourage reflection, discussion, and action on the part of educators – both those who recognize that they are experiencing disconnection in their lives and those who have not felt or seen it yet, either personally or professionally. We see these two roles as thoroughly enmeshed – our bodies, our emotions, our feelings, our mental health, our well-being, our energy and fatigue – all of these are part of a highly complex whole, of who we are, of the ways in which we engage with others, of how much we have within ourselves to share.

For many of us, our most salient and recent memories of disconnection may be tied to the pervasive, destructive, and ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic which ‘had a profound impact on higher education around the world’ (Leigh and Edwards, 2021: 823). There can be no doubt that the complex and interrelated layers of overlapping trauma and loss caused by the pandemic continue to affect our personal and professional lives (Brammer and Clark, 2020; Greenberg and Hibbert, 2020; Simpson et al., 2023). As we look back, we acknowledge the toll that it took on so many of us–the unprecedented and immediate shift to a framework rife with disconnection and isolation as we donned masks, physically separated, sanitized ourselves and everything around us, closed campuses, and quickly converted our learning and teaching to online platforms (Echambadi et al., 2022; Xie et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022). We were physically and socially distanced, with most of us experiencing deep longing for connection (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2023). And although many tertiary institutions have opened their doors and returned to face-to-face teaching, our experience is that there is an overwhelming sense of isolation and disconnection which remains. We believe this is because the pandemic was simply a mechanism through which disconnection became more socially acceptable as a visible practice embedded in our day-to-day activities, it was not the mechanism through which disconnection was created.

Disconnection has a long history of growing within, between, and around us. It has many names and comes in many forms (e.g. racism, sexism, ablism, nationalism, genderism, misogyny, and xenophobia, to name a few), all of which are tethered to hate and manifest as polarizing otherness (Riad, 2024). And there are other, less visible but equally sinister and damaging types of disconnection including apathy, ignorance, and indifference. None of these is new to our communities, our world, our higher education institutions. They seep into the foundation of our experience, taking hold in places we cannot (or do not care to) see. And yet, we wonder, as authors shaping a provocation aimed at encouraging connection, how is it that we continue to feed this disconnect in a world where wars are raging, poverty is growing, climate change is accelerating, socioeconomic inequities abound, and the injustices and extremes we should be collectively fighting to address are growing more and more intractable each day (Peredo et al., 2022)? We need each other more and more, and we live in a world with unprecedented technological opportunity in terms of the ways in which we can connect with others anywhere, anytime, yet there is a seemingly unyielding loneliness around us.

So here we stand, so many of us, with separation permeating our lived experiences. Academia has been described as having elitist structures with power-laden systems that encourage degradation through censorship, anti-intellectualism, isolation, deprivation, and submission (Hartz, 2023). These toxic spaces result in so many of us experiencing the academy-at-large as both abstract, sterile, and self-referential (Cunliffe, 2022: 9). Within the institutionalized ‘targets and terror’ of the ‘performative university’, fragile, precarious, and, at times, brutal, structures and relationships have become entrenched, resulting in outcomes of ‘anxiety, powerlessness, mistrust, and complicity’ on the part of educators and other institutional actors (Jones et al., 2020: 365). And yet, we have resigned ourselves to living and working within the physically present, and yet also invisible, walls around us.

To subsist and survive, we–the larger amalgam of actors, environments, and institutional practices within higher education–have become distant and complacent. We recognize that our educational contexts should be deeply embedded within the beautifully interwoven, complex, and disrupted environments around us, yet we communicate by using the lowest common denominator. We present information (the antithesis of engaged and connected learning) to our students as a series of singular topics that are simple and discrete. We can no longer claim to be enacting connection when we are actively engendering disconnection.

As the authors of this provocation, we are a small group of academics, one of whom has never met the other two in person, and yet our interactions, grounded in respect, trust, care, collaboration, nurturing, vulnerability, and then, as a way of expressing our thoughts and emotions, through poetry, have connected us together as a small, yet powerful, ‘We’ (Korber et al., 2023). The members of our ‘We’ have been shaped by different experiences, and yet the fact that we have each lived through an intense period of isolation outside of the pandemic has helped to strengthen our bond. Together, our ‘I’s have become a ‘We’ through our shared commitment to reflection (both individually and collaboratively), extension (within ourselves and towards each other), and connection (within the many and varied communities of which we are, individually and collectively, a part) (Dyer et al., 2024).

For us, this process unfolded seamlessly, with every encounter emanating warmth, generosity, and connection. It started when two of us, Amy and Sophia, were introduced to each other via email by a shared colleague and friend from the United States. Our connection with each other was instantaneous, largely because our virtual conversations were grounded in something we are both passionate about – our deep commitment to a teaching practice called service-learning. Sophia was excited to share about the community projects they and their colleagues had been designing and embedding in their courses since the full-scale Russian invasion in February of 2022. When Amy found out what Sophia and her colleagues were doing in terms of creating deeply purposeful and engaging service-learning projects for their students within an environment of extreme uncertainty and devastation, we began our work together. We were then, and are now, wholeheartedly connected through a mission to share the stories of Ukrainian educators using service-learning as they live and teach, with resilience, passion, purpose, and hope, through war.

It was approximately 1 year later, after countless email communications, personal gifts sent through the mail, shared pictures of our families, a research project, an interview project, a podcast, and virtually meeting each other’s friends and families that the seed of this provocation germinated. It was clear, our connection was strong, and it was special to each of us in a way that we had not anticipated. In our hearts we knew that we had become lifelong friends, sharing a deeply felt love and respect for each other. This was also a time when it had become clear there was no end in sight for the war. There was less and less international attention and aid headed to Ukraine. Sophia and her colleagues were exhausted. They felt increasingly isolated from the rest of the world and, in many ways, forgotten. It was that isolation that served as the seed for this provocation.

We began talking about the power of our connection with each other, and our shared understanding of what it meant to feel completely alone. Amy wrote a poem to express what she was feeling. Sophia said she was not comfortable with poetry but had a talented colleague who was an award-winning service-learning educator and had, in response to the war, been creating emotionally evocative, beautifully written poetry. We invited Yulia to join us in our discussions about how we might shape our thoughts about the pervasiveness of disconnection within our lived experiences. Yulia shared videos of her work with her students, capturing not only the meaningful projects her students were contributing to the community around them, but also how that work had affected her and her students, knowing that they were, together, creating connections and finding purpose amid the chaos and debilitating reality of living within war. Yulia’s sharing inspired more sharing, learning, and connecting between us. Our (now) three-way bond deepened as we nurtured our relationship, which was grounded in passion, respect, trust, and kindness. Within 2 weeks, Yulia wrote the poem you see above. She poured her heart and soul into it, powerfully capturing the extreme and intertwined tensions of sadness and joy, hope and despair, connection and disconnection, and life and death. It was the perfect catalyst for us moving forward. The seed for this provocation had germinated. We had transitioned from three individual ‘I’s to a passionate, purpose-driven, radically vulnerable, and wholeheartedly connected ‘We’.

It was within that moment the call we share here with you took flight. Through this provocation, we implore educators, ourselves included, to not only open our eyes and vulnerably assess the extent to which we are active participants in a growing normalization of disconnection, but also consider the ways in which we can, are, and should be consciously and thoughtfully working to nurture (re)connection through collaboration and community engagement.

Our isolations are not unique, yet they shape our lived experiences

We all have isolations in our lives that lead to disconnection. For the authors of this provocation, our cathartic isolations stem from health and war, respectively. As above, one of us has only recently returned to teaching after 11 years in treatment for an aggressive cancer. There is endless gratitude for the ability to be back at work, a privileged space of learning and teaching, yet so much has changed during the past decade. Students and educators seem to exist, invisibly and yet resolutely, tied to their phones, tablets, watches, and devices. There is so little eye contact; everyone is looking down. The space for warmth is here, but there is so little being shared. There was so much isolation during treatment and yet it still permeates every day. As the author living within these words and in this space, I feel loss, fatigue, a deep longing for connection, and hope.

Hope is what the three of us found in and with each other. Hope is what we all have in our hearts, waiting to be realized and enacted. For our journeys, our hope was nurtured through reflection and the connection that came from collaboratively exploring what our lived experiences were and are. Now, we ask that of you, our readers, as part of the journey we are on together in this provocation. Below, we share some starting points for reflection, with the acknowledgement that these questions are just the seeds that are being planted here. These are the questions that helped us shape our thoughts leading to this provocation. We continue to reflect upon and share them individually and with each other. As with anything that develops and matures, there is enormous growth and nurturing that lies ahead:

In terms of our teaching, are we encouraging thoughtful, engaging, collaborative, reflexive, developmental, and efficacious action on the part of our students or are they passively enduring an extension of the discrete, neoliberal, mechanistic, prescriptive, extractivist, and individualised experiences found throughout so many of our universities? Are we, as teachers and guides on these learning journeys, engaging in active exploring, embedding, and nurturing the many webs of interconnectivity related to the content we share in our classes or are we deconstructing and simplifying it in a way that further disconnects it from the realities of its, and our, existence?

In our roles as scholars and members of our academic communities, are we defining and contextualizing ourselves as actors who are both responsible for, and connected with, each other or are we reinforcing the ‘I’ and ‘me’ individualist approach of colonial, neoliberal, and managerialist education that has been historically promoted in so many of our disciplines, institutions, and wider Academies? Relatedly, when we consider our relationships with colleagues, both internal and external to our institutions and geographic regions, are we genuinely connected (and actively connecting) with others around us or are we disconnected in ways we no longer even recognize? Are we looking past the labels of tenure, discipline, and gatekeeper status to see our colleagues for who they fully are, and what they have to fully give, in a world where diversity of experience is so critical, or are we prisoners to judging others through a power-laden and exclusionary lens which reinforces homogeneity, stifles innovation, and sabotages the potential of community and connection?

These are challenging questions we invite you to consider, and we join you in realizing that there are parts of our lives where we are not yet connected and do not feel like fully entrenched members of the multiple respective communities of which we are each (formally and informally) a part. We long for more and do not yet feel fully (re)connected. It in this tentative space that we encourage you to experiment with radical openness, to not only explore these questions with yourself, but also connect with one or two individuals whom you trust and feel comfortable openly and vulnerably engaging in discussions about these topics, as you work to extend and shape them to your space and place. If our story of disconnection is anything like yours, there are countless points of connection waiting to be (re)discovered and repaired.

Nurturing (re)connection through collaboration and community engagement

Beyond reflecting upon disconnection, we encourage an active and intentional engagement with a nurturing of (re)connection. As we encourage you to walk away from the path of conformance and disconnection, we would like to offer a few paths for those who acknowledge their varying levels of discomfort, concealment, and complicity within our higher educational institutional environments (Jones et al., 2023).

First, look beyond the walls around you, as we have. Look to the communities outside of your university. If there is anything to be learned from this provocation, it is that fully nurtured connection and collaboration can take place across all types of borders. We, the three co-authors of this essay, live on opposite sides of the planet within vastly different institutional, cultural, and geopolitical spaces. We work and teach in different disciplinary areas including management, international business, and theology, and our positions represent a range of institutional administrative responsibilities and tenure levels. And yet our friendship, our bond, and our intense ability to feel warmth and connection with each other has never required being in the same physical space or to be similar to each other in any way except the one that brought us together – our passion for service-learning.

Our learning from this experience is to encourage everyone reading this to collaborate with others who are from different geographic and institutional locations and have richly diverse sets of experiences. Find others with whom you would like invest your time to develop meaningful ‘We’s (Dyer et al., 2024). In terms of geography, remember that there are countless educators from universities all over the world who are longing to create connection through collaboration. This sense of longing is particularly acute for those who are living through severe disruption (Greenfield, 2024) as two of us have been for almost 3 years within the war in Ukraine. There are countless other educators around the world who find themselves isolated by disruptive extremes as they live through war, famine, raging social and political inequalities, natural disasters, and other unimaginable (for most of us) crises (Sharma et al., 2023). And yet we each have the power to connect. We encourage everyone reading this to go online and search for educators who are interested in similar topic areas to yours. Reach out. Engage. There is no end to the meaningful and powerful connections that may result.

Second, to help nurture these connections, and to focus on our roles as teachers and guides for learning, we offer more insight into the path that brought us together. As we shared above, we were first introduced, virtually, because of our engagement with a pedagogical tool called service-learning. It comes as no surprise given our experiences of disconnection that we were drawn to a teaching tool that is designed to create connection, something we view as particularly important given the fact that higher educational institutions continue to be described as largely disconnected from practitioners and communities around them (Alakavuklar, 2023; Cowen and Cowen, 2010; De Man et al., 2022). To address this issue, service-learning requires educators to reshape interactions such that there is a focus on collaboration, engagement, and mutually respectful learning between educators, students, and the communities around them (Fougère et al., 2020; Holmes et al., 2022). It is a tool that is recognized as helping to build connection both within times of peace and prosperity as well as times of crisis and fracture (Kenworthy and Opatska, 2023). As Mejia (2021) shares in her passionate call for ‘crisis teaching’ using service-learning, ‘the pandemic has made it clear that many of us will not tolerate the way it has always been and are willing to imagine something better’ (p. 47). She continues her critique of our current institutional isolation by sharing that the ‘practices of a neoliberal university. . . are antithetical to reciprocity and reproduce community-campus connections, obligations, and responsibilities that are hierarchical and detrimental and, at times, exploitative’ (p. 47).

From our perspectives, we could not agree more, which is one of the reasons why service-learning continues to call to us as a stimulus for nurturing our own, and our students’, reflection- and reciprocity-based engagement. These engagements often lead to not only heightened learning but also feelings of enriched connection and meaningful contribution for all involved parties (Macías Gomez-Estern et al., 2021). As Yulia so beautifully described when reflecting on this essay, ‘For Ukrainians right now, service-learning serves as a kind of “trust glue” forming a critical part of our social agreement: soldiers fight, and the rest of us work tirelessly to support them and each other, we do these things as we work together for our future’. Sophia also shared,

‘Service-learning is much more than a teaching tool for us. It is difficult to describe in words. It helps us to stay connected with the reality outside of the classroom, to have purpose, and feel useful. And right now, for every Ukrainian, it is crucial to feel useful as we work to achieve victory and a just peace together’.

As a final thought, Amy reflected,

‘Service-learning is, at its core, about creating connections. It is about everything we are calling for in this provocation. When we embed service-learning in our courses, we are creating spaces within which students and educators work with, and learn from, others in our community. We do this through engaging – respectfully, equally, and collaboratively – with community partners to meaningfully and impactfully address identified needs’.

When writing this section of the essay, one of the things we all agreed upon is that service-learning has become part of our own cores as educators, helping to define who we are. We believe this is because much of the learning related to these projects stems from our students’ and our own recognizing and reflecting upon our vulnerabilities, fragilities, and inherent needs related to each other; starting with the realization that we are all equally human and should respect and embrace each other as such – a point of connection we are afraid many have forgotten.

Third, extending the opportunity to create connections beyond our local communities into those you make with other educators through networking, why not apply the radical openness we describe above to the finite resources you invest in conference attendance? Rather than focusing your limited time and money on the one or two traditional, journal gatekeeper focused, power-laden, and truly massive ‘you must attend this if you are to be seen as legitimate’ conferences in your discipline, why not experiment with attending smaller niche conferences focused on your area(s) of interest? If you are unable to secure funding to do that every year, then how about alternate years? In our experience, many of the domain-specific small conference settings are not only nurturing for your mind, but also your spirit, because fewer attendees will typically mean there is an abundance of opportunity to engage with others who are interested in talking about things that excite you in terms of your teaching, research, and career journey. And the beauty of this is that the benefits of niche conferences can be experienced by educators at every professorial level, because, when done well, everyone’s contributions count equally when groups are fully celebrating and leveraging the knowledge held within members’ diverse experiences, backgrounds, and tenures (Dyer et al., 2024).

A final path we share here for developing connection within our higher educational institutions is to actively encourage a focus on support, collaboration, and well-being with others (Gavin et al., 2023). When we interact in ways that are nurturing and generative in terms of a focus on wellness, we can help to gently push ourselves and each other into spaces within which we ‘reflect, reframe and re-think’ (Brewis and Bell, 2020: 535) about the often superficial and tenuous connections we have with others around us. Much of higher education embodies a culture of disconnect that starts from the beginning. Few of us were trained in doctoral programmes which we experienced as wholly supportive and growth-oriented; most of us were trained to believe that the academic environment is, at its core, competitive and that to excel can only be done through demonstrations of superiority grounded in overly critical, hurtful, and dehumanizing messages to each other. And it spreads from there. We see it in the blind adoption and forced integration of institutional systems, rather than selective, thoughtful, and culturally specific considerations of how those systems will support or inhibit connectedness. We see it in nationally and internationally prescribed key performance indicator categories, in the competitively based outcomes that are celebrated within institutions, in forced curves, in online trainings which oversimplify and trivialize important social issues, in the content we are required to teach, and in the marginalized importance assigned to teaching in general. We see it in the ways in which junior faculty live in fear of never achieving ‘enough’ (Jones et al., 2023). And we see it here, at times, in the process of creating and disseminating knowledge through publication. Yet we know that there is a different path forward – one we can create together with support, care, and connection at its core.

It is the latter path we walked on here, within this essay, through the thoughtfully crafted feedback we received from the anonymous reviewers who joined us on our journey. As we read through their reactions to our work, we felt nurtured and respected, seen and heard. Their words held deeply insightful perspectives about how our work was experienced by readers who were unfamiliar with our stories and unknown to us. They were kind yet strong in their convictions of ways in which the essay needed to be strengthened to provide a storyline that could be understood, and accessed emotionally, by others. They were respectful and caring with their comments, and although we were given a ‘high risk’ revision, it felt like we were working with friends who had our best interests at heart – people who were lifting us up, not pushing us down, and had, without knowing, become part of our ‘We’. As a result of our experience, and all that it represented in terms of the weaving of community and connection into our shared journey, we were moved by our own embracing of radical openness to shape another poem. We wrote this one together, all three of us, with our anonymous review team felt within and throughout the words. We welcome you into it also, for you – the reader – are now an integral part of the weaving of our story.

Dropping Stones of Hope and Healing to Create Ripples of (Re)connection and Repair

     Why are you here, they said?

   Please shine the light brighter so we can see you.

    We, too, feel the darkness seeping around us.

    We see the limbs, lives, and connections lost.

    Within the light is where we would like to be.

     We will go there. Together.

    This is the woven fabric of storying.

     To be pushed and yet held close.

     Challenged, yet nurtured.

  Touched by a gentle beauty, understanding, and care.

   There is a fear when we share our stories.

     For we have seen too much.

   We are broken in parts, yet are drawn together.

  Our vulnerability nourished by our trauma and pain.

  We bear witness to death, devastation, and destruction.

    Our world has been so full of fractures,

 Manifesting as war, poverty, famine, conflict, and sickness,

   It’s a hunger that is fed by hate, pain, and loss.

   There is so much fragility and disconnection.

 We know this with a raw intimacy; it is within and around us.

   But we are strong. And even stronger together.

  Awareness and connection are our catalysts for change.

    We have stones of hope in our hearts.

   They are heavy with promise and warmth.

   We beg for healing, of ourselves and others.

  We change our world, one space and place at a time.

    We are where we long to be.

     We could not see it before.

    The place so many of us remember.

   Filled with nurturing, generativity, and love.

  We are so grateful, with so much potential.

   We need healing. We have hope, and each other.

     Let us stand connected.

     Here. Now.

   Together, we drop our stones in the water,

   Creating ripples of (re)connection and repair.

Our stones of hope are heavy, as is our vulnerability and connection here in this provocation. The call we share is to intentionally reconnect with the ‘more-than-human that we are all a part of’ (Calás and Smircich’s essay in Peredo et al., 2022: 352). It is time for each of us to ‘get out of our armchairs, put on our boots, and be willing to get them dirty by joining forces with others on the ground trying to effect change’ (Gray, 2023: 180). Together, we have the power to reverse the normalization of disconnection.

To achieve that, first we must acknowledge that it exists. Realizing this shift is possible if we allow ourselves to ‘sit in discomfort’ as we critically reflect upon our conscious and unconscious reinforcement of the disconnections within our environments (Whooper, 2022: 426). We need to ‘hold the pain of the answer’ for the questions we are asking as we look within and around ourselves to identify our feelings and (in)actions (Gray, 2023: 184). Drawing upon our experiences, as the authors of this provocation essay, we see how the process of embracing a vulnerable and radical openness to our own traumas and pain sits as the keystone in the arch that is the bridge connecting us. As hard as this work will be for everyone who engages in it with us, we know we can achieve it together. There are so many things we can do to take these first steps together. For example, there is an immense and beautiful power in smiling at someone and saying hello using their name. Start by learning the names of those around you, smile and say hello when you pass by, and see who responds in a like manner. Focus your awareness on the feelings you have as others respond to you and let your gut be your guide in terms of where, and with whom, you invest time and energy. Make those decisions, to the extent that you can, yourself. Look outside of your department and school to meet and develop connections with people who have interests that fit with yours and be reassured in the knowledge that ‘inter/cross/trans-disciplinary research . . . is now more vital than ever’ (Riad, 2024: 524). Keep looking. Look beyond your institution. Know that there are other academics around the world calling out to be seen and heard, with rich experiences, immense knowledge, skill, creativity, passion, and a deep desire to work together with others (Kenworthy et al., 2025).

We are not alone with our longing. We can make a difference and reclaim togetherness within our institutional environments. Here, today, with you as part of the woven fabric of this provocation, we call for the embodiment and engendering of a purposeful, inclusive, collaboration- and community-based period of (re)connection.

We have wasted too much time apart already.

As each of us, the three authors of this provocation, can attest, life is a precious gift; every smile, hello, and connection counts. As a beautiful testament to this, one of our reviewers said our work reminded them of Meyerson’s (2001) discussion of tempered radicals – those who ‘quietly challenge prevailing wisdom and gently provoke their organizational cultures to adapt’ (p. 1). Tempered radicals enact change in organizations in the same way that small drops of water have the power to erode granite. We wholeheartedly believe that premise applies here, and that every action each of us undertakes with the aim of engaging in (re)connection is a drop of water that will help us reverse the normalization of disconnection. Let us experience these things and more together with a wholehearted embracing of courage, activism, care, compassion, collaboration, and a radical openness to connection.

Standing together, using the stones of hope in our hearts, we will enact change through ripples of (re)connection and repair.