Academics Remaining Upbeat Amidst the Higher Education Polycrisis Context: A Co-reflexive Arts-Inspired Collaborative Self-Study

Abstract

This article maps the authors’ artful inquiry at the interface of poetry, artmaking, academic work, and the higher education polycrisis, asking, “What does our artful knowing make visible about academic work in the higher education polycrisis context?” “How do we poetically come to acknowledge our response-ability as academics working with and beyond the polycrisis?” “What does our co-creative artmaking produce as positive resistance?” and “Why does this matter?” Our collaborative, arts-based self-study practice was inspired by the keynote speakers at a South African conference in 2023, who offered various perspectives on the higher education polycrisis. By working with layers of poetry—found tanka poems—we were able to visually enflesh our entanglement with the polycrisis as positive resistance and creative scholarship. We devised a visual method for co-creating an analogue collage. Our use of a co-created collage as a research method was an inclusive, endogenous method that made it possible to positively imagine our academic work context. Our co-created collage served as an artefact to assist us in answering our research questions and in exploring how our academic learning was enabled whilst remaining in step with the current higher education context. Our recognition of embodied knowledge, artful practices and a material, practice-based understanding of academic work and theories of knowledge production fostered different ways to keep abreast of the polycrisis in higher education.

Introduction

We are two women educational researchers who studied together and are now teacher educators at the same higher education institution—University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. We have been friends, critical friends, and research colleagues for more than two decades. We are educational scholars with different cultural and professional academic subject backgrounds. Linda is a mathematics teacher educator whose research interests focus on social educational issues; Daisy specialises in teacher development studies, and her research interests relate to academic identities. We share a deep commitment to self-reflexive inquiry and material, arts-inspired strategies, and approaches to studying the academic self to enable fuller, situated understandings of educational practice. As arts-based educational researchers, we draw on theories of knowledge production that value and recognise our embodied and tacit experiences and contextual realities to deepen our learning and respond ethically to care-full and creative teacher educational scholarship (Badat, 2023).

We are members of a self-reflexive special interest group (SIG) that uses a variety of artistic research methods and representations to push thought to the edge—and beyond what we already know and think. For example, in Pithouse-Morgan et al. (2018), we drew on visual exegesis (artwork analysis) to co-flexively consider how collective self-study research across diverse higher education institutions and disciplines could provide opportunities to build a more holistic and deeper understanding of our practice as self-study supervisors. Elsewhere, using concise poetic forms, we examined the SIG’s publications in various journal special issues, highlighting how this wide-ranging scholarship speaks to the complex South African educational landscape and “promotes educational development and justice, advances conceptual and theoretical understanding, and broadens research methodology” (Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2024, p. 65). Furthermore, we presented at a South African education conference in 2023, each creating a visual image as a stimulus for composing a poem. This poetic thinking facilitated theorising about and of our lived academic work experiences. We were also nudged to plug into the concepts of dark times and polycrisis by the conference keynote speakers, who debated them in the context of the foundations of South African higher education (Badat, 2023; Ebrahim, 2023; le Grange, 2023). And, we were excited and inspired by the speaker Kulundu-Bolus (2023) who performed her response to the theme of educational futures visions as a song. Thus, we were inspired to employ artful inquiry as a means to make sense of academic work in the context of the polycrisis.

This article maps our artful inquiry at the interface of poetry, artmaking, academic work, and the polycrisis in higher education, and we ask, “What does our artful knowing make visible about academic work in the higher education polycrisis context?” “How do we poetically come to acknowledge our response-ability as academics working within the polycrisis?” “What does our co-creative artmaking produce as positive resistance?” and “Why does this matter?” By taking a collaborative, creative (co-creative) self-study approach, we found it possible to engage in research that is slow, purposeful, educationally creative, and enjoyable—even in times that may be considered to be dark and perplexing. In the article, we collaboratively use a self-study approach to creatively explore our academic work as an imagination space for creative educational scholarship in higher education. Poetic thinking, poetic knowing, and artmaking pushed us to confront and reveal ambiguities in what we come to know/unknow, and how we share that knowledge about our academic work in a South African higher education setting.

Our Higher Education Teaching and Learning Context

There is no shortage of troubling issues in Africa. When asked about challenges facing African higher education, Schreiber (quoted in Sawahel, 2024, para. 24) noted both global affairs and additional concerns in Africa, such as “civil, national and climate wars, migration, radicalisation, and gender violence”. Schreiber indicated that in African schooling and higher education systems, redefinition of teacher and learning approaches is necessary and argued that their educational and living contexts are challenged by a lack of transparent, fundamental governance and management.

Badat’s (2023) concerns about South African higher education governance are centred on inadequate political interventions to counteract neo-liberal capitalism. Badat contended that neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005) and globalisation (Boulton & Lucas, 2011) have entrenched a market-driven society. With the abolition of apartheid in 1994, together with globalisation and the market economy that is manifested in the higher education sector, the solution to the funding crisis at universities has compromised the quality and promotion of equity and inclusion. Another result of neoliberalism, according to Pető (2023), is academics feeling disillusioned and dissatisfied because of a lack of funding and ever-increasing administrative demands. These higher education issues lead some academics to foresee bleak prospects for educational reform in South Africa.

Furthermore, Swartz et al. (2019, p. 567) described the transformation agendas in South African higher education as falling “between a rock and a hard place.” The alternatives are either to continue to be stratified by increasing fees or to gain revenue through market-driven activities (such as publication production emphasis) in place of academic teaching and learning responsibilities. This focus on academics as being central to revenue production results in enormous academic demands that cause academic burnout (Badat, 2023).

Contemporary issues in South African higher education can indeed be likened to dark times. Researchers have referred to dark times when reporting on victims’ war experiences or the struggles of societies coming to terms with the assassinations of prominent educational, religious, or political figures (Fiala, 2023).

Higher education crises are not isolated, separate matters but can feed off one another to form an interconnected set or conglomeration of multiple crises. Morin and Kern (1999) introduced the concept of polycrisis, pointing out that multiple crises often interact with one another. Lawrence et al. (2024, p. 4) defined a polycrisis as “the causal entanglement of crises… In ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects.” Lawrence et al. further noted that a significant feature of polycrisis is that the harm of multiple crises conglomeration is usually worse than the harm of isolated individual crises. Nonetheless, the concept of polycrisis is not novel, and it disguises capital interests (Lawrence et al., 2024).

However, we do not wish to dwell on higher education culture and its ills as dark and enveloped by polycrisis. We wished to facilitate awareness in ourselves and our ways of knowing as academics and as members of educational research communities to produce different knowledge—a knowledge framed from an ethics of care perspective, and aimed at “starting with ourselves” (van Manen, 1990, p. 43) as the site for “working on [our]selves to achieve new kinds of existence” (Allan, 2013, p. 27). In this study, we turned our gaze on the self–other as relational and open to resistance and transformation, rather than becoming disgruntled with work-life complexities in the South African higher education system.

Self-Study Research

As a research duo, we are the only participants in this study. Being based in two different South African provinces necessitated communicating and working via email, Zoom, and WhatsApp. We provide a detailed account of the research study process to strengthen the trustworthiness (Feldman, 2003) of our study. We selected the self-study methodology because it offers opportunities to wonder optimistically, even in difficult spaces and contexts. As Freese et al. (2000, p. 79) remind us, “self-study is grounded in a positive, hopeful spirit which believes that our educational practice can always be improved.” One of the five defining characteristics of self-study methodology (LaBoskey, 2004) is that it is improvement aimed. Self-study is initiated by a researcher and is focused on that initiator; collaborative self-study is a purposeful way of strengthening research trustworthiness as well as providing additional viewpoints and interpretations during this research process (Loughran & Northfield, 1998). In addition to the advantages of collaboration, our self-study aimed to be interactive during the research process, make use of arts-based strategies, and ensure validity through sharing and publicly making known the research process and findings to evoke further reflection, dialogue, and discussion (LaBoskey, 2004).

Why We Selected Arts-Based Methods

According to Garbett and Ovens (2014), ever-changing, diverse educational contexts necessitate adapting research methods to remain relevant. Self-study research’s malleability allows for progressing from they should in research recommendations, to exploring the potential of why not? (Eisner, 2002; Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2016). Furthermore, as Eisner (2002) indicated, the arts encourage imagination and seeing things in different ways to assist in wondering. This sanctions our exploration of ways to contemplate, ponder, reflect on, or wonder how we can improve our academic work within the experienced living realities of the South African higher education context. Through self-study research, we are afforded opportunities to muse and dream about appropriate and sustainable possibilities for our educational practices.

In this article, we make public our personal experiences as women scholars working in the South African higher education context. We value the opportunities offered by arts-based self-study to reflect and co-reflect on our daily, lived polycrisis experiences and simultaneously engage with constructive, generative, and ethically responsive educational research. Moreover, we chose creative art-inspired methods because we aspire to engage in embodied, passionate research methods that bridge both “artistic-self and research-self” (Leavy, 2020, p. 3) with the researcher and audience. Through artistic creation, reflections, and using cross-disciplinary arts-based research practices, we can reap the benefits of adopting creative arts tools to intertwine theory and our academic practices (Leavy, 2020). We further concur with Leavy (2020), who maintained that art facilitates the enhancement of traditional qualitative methods, and we intend to make good use of the strengths of art practices. Leavy’s (2020) list of strengths included: gaining new insights and learning, problem-centred learning, forging micro-macro connections, working holistically, being evocative and provocative, raising awareness and empathy, facilitating dialogue, encouraging multiple meanings, public scholarship, and attending to social justice.

We selected poetic inquiry as one of our methods. Through detailed particulars of our poetic inquiry process, we will describe how our learning occurred. We also consider the concept of vigour, as opposed to rigour (Faulkner, 2019), to be an appropriate quality gauge for this study. Thus, our research should be assessed in terms of, for example, usefulness, competence, passion, and robustness. Cutts and Waters (2019) defined poetic inquiry as a research method and a research outcome and asserted that, as part of the poetic inquiry process, poetry may be used as “a data source, the analytical and interpretative lenses, and/or the presentation.” We used poetry in our research process as a data source (our poems we had earlier performed at the South African conference in 2023) , as an analytical lens (by creating found tanka poems (Butler-Kisber, 2005)), as an interpretative lens (for answering our research questions), and in presentation (by succinctly displaying our findings as a tanka found poem).

Our Collaborative Study Process

The data sources we used for reflection and co-reflection were (1) our individual sets of self-created visual images and associated self-created poems presented at the South African conference and later, (2) our co-created collage artwork and associated transcribed dialogic responses to explore what we learned.

Our artful organic research process evolved in four stages: first, we separately and individually prepared an image and a responding poem to perform at the conference. Second, we individually reflected on our own and each other’s image and poem presented at the conference, and each individually created two tanka based on those reflections. Third, we co-created a single tanka to assimilate our four individual tanka, and interpreted this tanka dialogically. Fourth, we co-created a collage and co-reflected dialogically on our inventive “hands-on” Zoom creation process.

What Does Our Artful Knowing Make Visible About Academic Work in the Higher Education Polycrisis Context?

In 2023, we individually responded to the South African conference call. The conference session was designed as a poetic performance where participants were invited to present an image and perform an associated self-created poem. After these poem enactments, the participants were encouraged to deepen and extend their research learning and knowing by engaging with the audience.

We presented the following images and associated poems at the session (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

Daisy’s Image and Poem

Figure 2.

Linda’s Image and Poem

After the conference session, we agreed to expand our conference learning through co-engagement in additional reflexive, poetic, and artistic processes. We commenced our extended reflexive journey by individually reflecting on our own conference images and poems.

Reflections of Our Image and Poem Presented at a South African Conference

Two extracts of our reflections on our presentations follow, by way of example.

Linda Reflected on Her Poem

My poem is positive about me doing self-study as an academic developing my learning in relation to educational issues. . . . It is about the journey that I have enjoyed and how self-study has supported me and what it means to me. The poem only uses metaphors, and I created my poem using the format used by Nichols (1984) who wrote a “Praise Song for My Mother.”

Daisy Reflected on Her Image

Painting the neoliberal subject as an academic was a call to voice myself as an artist, arts-based educational researcher, and neoliberal subject in the comfort of my imagination space. . . . The academic exposed all her creativity and vulnerability. The leafy branches affirm and grow out lively and lush from her bosom. Her agency to find alternate ways to exist in the university rests in her hands.

After reflecting on our images and poems, we each reflected on the other’s images and poems to gain a shared impression of our artistic creations.

Reflections on the Other’s Image and Poem

Two extracts from our reflections on each other’s image and poem follow.

Linda Reflected on Daisy’s Poem

Stanza 3 envisions the end of neoliberalism as the issue amalgamates, and is ensnared to make way for more appropriate, different living circumstances, and there is a longing desire for this to materialise.

Daisy Reflected on Linda’s Image

The centre panel speaks of her desire to see the entanglement between the human and the beyond-human elements. In the central panel, she depicts the agency that rests in her hands to see her teacher educator self as the site of transformation and to interrupt fixed and formulaic ways of thinking as a mathematics educator, as disembodied and disconnected from nature and the everyday complexities of living.

Our reflexive musings in our writing process, particularly in correspondence with each other, were a way of “summoning the gaze of the other” (Foucault, 1997, p. 247) and a practice of ethical care that the self-engaged is because “one cannot draw everything from one’s own funds . . . the help of others is necessary” (p. 236). The rereading and feedback as a meditative space assisted us to push our thoughts beyond their limits, look at things differently and move between and across superficial traditional disciplinary boundaries that disconnect our academic work.

How Do We Poetically Come to Acknowledge Our Response-Ability as Academics Working within the Polycrisis?

Using poetic analysis, we each created two found tanka (Samaras & Pithouse-Morgan, 2024) to assemble and distil our image and poem reflections. Each tanka highlighted combined concepts from Linda’s and Daisy’s reflections for each image and poem. Thus, we each individually created two tanka to bring our reflections of each image and poem together for shared interaction and dialogue. Our four individually created tanka are presented below.

In the Palm of My Hands (Linda)

Each vital movement

Powerful central story

Agency in hand

Reinvented entanglement

Artful oxygen for life

The Wind Beneath My Wings (Linda)

Alternate ways for

Different landscapes research

Learning improvements

In enjoyable journeys

Imaginative changes

Seeking Difference (Daisy)

Inner self laying bare

Naked body pondering

Seeking difference

Abreast the polycrisis

Alternate ways to exist

Passionate Transformation (Daisy)

Superficial lives

Ambiguously become

Flaming desire

Materialise emergence

Passionate transformation

Through the titles of two of our tanka, “Seeking Difference” and “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” we were able to make tangible our desire to move towards seeing our work within the higher education polycrisis in a more ethically, affirmative manner. We thus came to accept the negativity and melancholy in our academic context as a form of positive resistance (Braidotti, 2010) by recognising the self as a site for seeking a different way of doing academic work. We experienced feelings of care, joy, and passionate curiosity about our envisaged transformation. In addition, we were capable of “flying off” and being above, and free of, the negativity of our academic context, which is enveloped in a polycrisis.

These four individually created tanka, composed from our reflections, pushed us to look (and look again) at our poetic assemblages. As Leggo (2008, p. 165) explained, “poetic knowing” permits us as qualitative researchers to “experiment with language, to create, to know, to engage creatively and imaginatively with experience.” We allowed ourselves to move organically and later met via Zoom to display these four tanka and to collectively select lines for a co-created tanka that stood out as being meaningful to us in our passionate desire to embody our ethical responsibility in our work as academics. Our tanka is presented below.

Abreast the Polycrisis

Flaming desire

Materialise emergence

Difference in hand

Artful oxygen for life

Abreast the polycrisis

We made extensive use of the tanka format because it provided us with opportunities to pinpoint and succinctly convey our professional experiences in our higher education polycrisis context. The Japanese tanka consists of only 31 syllables, arranged in a 5-7-5-7-7 syllables per line format so there is a tight restriction on permitted word selections. This conventional tanka form (Poets.org, n.d.) also consists of two lines, one line, and then another two lines. The first two lines describe an image that anticipates a reaction in the last two lines, and the third line signals a standpoint movement.

Dialogues via Email, Zoom, and WhatsApp

During email, Zoom, and WhatsApp interactions, we responded to the lines of the poem “Abreast the Polycrisis” conversationally, and allowed our ideas and emotions to flow freely and organically. We had never questioned that we would use poetic inquiry as a means of exploring the emotional consequences of being academics in our higher education context. In the self-study research process, the possibilities for emotional engagement through poetry are well documented (Childs, 2006; Pithouse-Morgan, 2020). And, for example, Childs concluded that the poetic self understands learning as involving “impulses and intuition, a constant working and reworking of ideas and processes, [and] an ability to see any one thing from multiple perspectives” (2006, p. 53). “Abreast the Polycrisis” served as an artefact that facilitated responding to our research questions through thinking poetically (Freeman, 2017). Our poetic selves rely on the knowledge that “meaning often comes from form” (Childs, 2006, p. 53) and we appreciated the flexible, wondering opportunities offered using this artefact.

After the Zoom meeting in which we co-created our poem, we used the meeting transcript to individually interpret the poem. We responded to how artmaking assisted with response-ably negotiating the polycrisis in our academic lives. Daisy emailed her responses to Linda, who organised the collective responses as reflexive dialogues in response to the different lines of the interpretive tanka.

Using this poetic format to share our dialogic interpretations allowed us to include and expose both personal and shared descriptions of what we learned during our artmaking self-study. We divulged wondering strategies by exposing our lived experiences of the polycrisis. In addition, our dialogic format, in turn, extended our learning because of the clear focus afforded by organising our poetic thinking into a beginning, middle, and end (Edge & Olan, 2020). Our interpretations make public how we negotiated and navigated answering our research questions. Below, we present our joint tanka dialogue.

Linda

The images portrayed in the two opening tanka lines, “flaming desire” and “materialise emergence,” depict our burning, passionate longing for ethical ways of working as academics in the current South African teacher education context. Furthermore, as academics, we aim to explore physically perceptible means of engagement in order to rise out of our dark, polycrisis-encased educational context. In our dialogic Zoom conversations, we expressed disappointing experiences in our higher education context. In exploring those discussions, we extended our statements about current general challenges facing higher education to our particular lived academic experiences. We noted that our academic work made us feel claustrophobic—as academics, we usually work as isolated individuals, trapped behind our computers, and confined to enclosed spaces. We felt we were primarily valued as scholars because of our individual intellectual ability and computer acumen. And, these scholarly abilities appear to render us as bodiless, emotionless, motionless entities. In addition, permanent accessibility is required because higher education administrative tasks and professional demands are usually communicated via email and WhatsApp. We are peppered with demands that often require responses without allowing us sufficient time to “think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, and organize” (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1236). Our Zoom dialogues described how we are caught up in a highly technological and individualistic “fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal higher education” system (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1236) with insufficient opportunities for academic scholarship that allows for intellectual self-growth and personal freedom. We asked ourselves, “Do we have a choice for our academic work?”

Daisy

The first line of the tanka, “flaming desire,” reimages my vulnerable nakedness and the neoliberal gaze to one of sensuality and desire. Like the painting of the naked Venus (Botticelli, 1480), which is not how women were portrayed in the Middle Ages, a depiction of my nude academic self is not normally what is done in educational research. Artmaking assisted me to express the shifting accentuated contours of the neoliberal bodily form to one that flamingly blurs into/out of the background making it easier to feel the desire to be fluid and flesh-like, rather than fixed and statuesque. Against the dark times, imagining alternate forms of existence is affirming and relational.

“Materialise emergence” in the second line of the poem recognises the inner self, and how artmaking gives cloth to embodied feelings and tacit knowledge in order to keep abreast of the neoliberal culture. This artful imaging of the neoliberal moment is an opportunity to see the self as actively taking responsibility to feel alive. The feeling of joy in the embodied self is a claim to do ethical work within all the performativity of neoliberalism.

Linda

Our third, pivotal, tanka line, “difference in hand,” indicates how we facilitated our move towards seeking a different way for our academic work in our pressured, polycrisis-enveloped higher education context. We realised we could select academic learning strategies to avoid being caught up in the gloomy context. In other words, it is our responsibility to take action and find alternative ways of undertaking academic work—this action is in the palm of our hands. We chose to learn co-creatively, using arts-inspired self-study scholarship, and apply “oppositional consciousness” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 44) to materialise our movement. After establishing what we observed as negativity in our higher education context and through our personal experiences, we accepted this negativity as a “productive moment” to “engender positive resistance” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 44). As self-study researchers, we want to explore learning by thinking “with the times despite the times” as a “humble and empowering gesture of co-construction . . . of hope” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 56) to improve our academic scholarship.

Daisy

Seeking difference is not to separate oneself from the higher education institution’s performativity agenda and the crises, but a choice to not be swallowed up in the fast-paced wave. The third line or turning point of the poem highlights that the agency to seek an alternate way to exist lies with the ethical-relational self, studied through collaborative artful scholarship. Drawing on poetic thinking and artmaking as creative thinking spaces enables focus on the desire for an entangled material way to transform as an academic and to achieve a more meaningful practice-based understanding of how to be more hands-on in one’s becoming. “Difference in hand” draws attention to not getting caught up in the gloom, but to somehow find ways of doing research that is helpful to our minds and bodies—to both humans and more than human counterparts.

Linda

In the last two tanka lines, “artful oxygen for life” and “abreast the polycrisis,” we signify our envisaged knowledge development and professional choices, which exist within and side-by-side our higher education context. We choose to use adapted creative arts skills, including poetic inquiry, as a vital professional learning element—just as oxygen is a vital gaseous chemical element for all living organisms. In our context where the entire higher education community suffers as a result of the pervasive polycrisis, we consider a fundamental component of our academic learning to be in engagement with ways that cultivate humanising, caring academic cultures that include “space to care for ourselves, our colleagues and our students” (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1238). Mountz et al. encouraged commitment to slow scholarship as an alternative to the current fast-paced norm in higher education. Slow scholarship and care-full thinking and sharing enable an opening up of thoughts and writing in joyful, embodied ways, and make the practice of concepts morph and move “by our passions” (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1253). Through the creative self-study approach, we nourish alternate ways to improve our academic lives and recognise our embodied self-knowledge as sites for materialising slow scholarship in our situated contexts.

Daisy

Artful enfleshments of self are the oxygen for our academic life. Doing scholarship that is joyful, energising, and enlightening is to claim time for slow-paced scholarship versus the fast-paced cognitive exercise we do at our computers. Artful engagement calls for multisensorial connections that inspire movement, and spaces to be free to think and live abreast the polycrisis in a bureaucracy caught up in neoliberal culture. The harmful competition is dehumanising, and it disembodies us. Through reflection and feedback, we learned that we can work within a system, and the arts are potent for one to do things that are pleasing too.

Co-created Collage: what Does Our Artmaking Produce as Positive Resistance?

According to Law (2004), in social sciences research, it is important to provide clear research process details, so here, we provide a full account of our collage-making process. We co-created an analogue collage by glueing pictures to a flat surface. Using this traditional collage-making method, both Linda and Daisy selected and arranged images to create a composition. Because we were unable to have a face-to-face meeting, we created our collage during a Zoom dialogic meeting. Neither of us had previously co-created a collage. We each selected five images to use for the collage—these images needed to relate to how we see our academic work in our higher education context and to respond to our research question. Daisy sent her image selections via email to Linda, who printed and cut out our 10 images.

We took turns in deciding where our images best fit on a white polystyrene board. During the collage creation, we each indicated why we had chosen the particular image, how it related to our study, and our personal research question responses. Linda tentatively pinned and arranged the images on the polystyrene to produce an artwork that we considered appealing, purposeful, and responding to our academic work in higher education. During the construction, Linda continually held the developing pinned collage to her computer screen for Daisy’s input. After the Zoom meeting, Linda adjusted the loose images on a coloured board and sent a WhatsApp photograph to Daisy to confirm that she was satisfied with the final composition. Lastly, Linda glued the images onto the cardboard.

We used this Zoom meeting transcription to individually reflect on our artwork—not by analysing and describing the individual collage images but rather, by reflecting on our polycrisis experiences via the co-creation process, taking into account our academic work context. Our collage (Figure 3) and significant points discussed in our Zoom dialogic meeting follow below.

Figure 3.

Co-Created Collage Entitled “Our Co-creative Higher Education Academic Learning: Thinking in Step With Current Polycrisis Times”

During the collage creation process, we learned more about ourselves, and each other, and about collectively using an artmaking opportunity. Collage-making facilitated intense thinking when deciding what images to use for our collage, how to go about co-creating an artwork without having a face-to-face meeting, and how to structure, represent, and position (Butler-Kisber, 2010) our co-creative academic learning using our artwork. This meant that reflexivity and co-flexivity opportunities were available to imagine our collage method more generously (le Grange, 2007). Furthermore, our artwork served as an artefact to assist us in answering our research questions (Butler-Kisber, 2008).

The photographed image was blurred to soften and amplify the vibrant materiality and affective flows of the emergent handmade collage. In addition, the blurring prompts us to wonder about the multiple relationalities our co-constructed collage provoked for thinking about – beyond hierarchies and beyond the human. Moreover, this format heightens readers’ intrigue and encourages alternative collage interpretations and assemblages.

Our artefact facilitated exploring how our academic learning was enabled whilst remaining in step with and keeping abreast of the current higher education context. In our collage-making, we were nudged to “respond creatively to a world that is taken to be composed of an excess of generative forces and relations” (Law, 2004, p. 9). Our image selections were inspired by objects and pictures, mainly of the natural world, and they encouraged us to conceive the higher education context, hopefully. Our use of collage as a research method served as an inclusive, endogenous method that made it possible for us to include “dreams, visions, art, poetry, [and] artefacts” (le Grange, 2007, p. 427) in understanding our academic work context. Our creative activity led us to generative conversations in which new values and meanings ultimately led us to action by making our academic learning public.

Law (2004) called for the need to “reincarnate” social science research methods if we are to make sense of a world that includes and represents itself as “tide, flux, and general unpredictability” (p. 7). Drawing on this notion of the complexity of the world, we are pushed to consider how we might adjust our research methods to be slow, risky, and uncertain in understanding when contending with world realities. In collage making, we experienced the ponderous, risky, and unsettling effects of using an organic process to explore thinking in step with current higher education times. For example, we were unsure which images were permissible (regarding copyright laws) for a research artefact. We were uncertain how or if a co-created collage would nudge us to move beyond what we know and how we come to live in the academic world, given our enduring traditional research practices we have come to think with.

However, Law (2004) also pointed out the importance of social science academic work that makes us happy, creative, and generous, and, in our Zoom dialogue, we expressed our pleasure in doing and engaging in the traditional collage craft activity. Our conversations evoked spontaneous dialogue around the beauty within the messiness of the higher education context. We described our collage creation process as “magical.” The entanglement present in our artefact made us realise that we are not of central importance—but part of the context. We also recognised other energies (for example, heated emotional responses in our academic work enabled and inspired us to step up to keep abreast of the intense situation) to move beyond our higher education context in our academic work—and acknowledge being within the context and carrying the heat within our bodies as we seek ways to work ethically and generatively.

Our co-creative thinking and knowing using poetic and visual art forms assisted us in giving voice to feelings, ideas, and imaginations locked up in bodily knowledge (Pelias, 2008). Drawing on and working in a practice-based way with the arts enabled us to bring to the surface embodied and tacit knowledge about our everyday academic lives and the higher education polycrisis. Combining digital technologies made possible new, virtual ways of thinking and tinkering (Pithouse-Morgan & Samaras, 2020) to compose a collage of our collective interpretive response to the polycrisis. As educational researchers, we were nudged to work with the immediate now and to collaborate with others—humans and beyond—to think in creative ways with photos, AI-generated images, magazine pictures, feather earrings, women researchers, pins and cardboard, the Zoom platform, and affective flows. The joy and freedom to select, pin, move, cut up, overlap, underlap, story, and dialogue happened virtually and organically in the collage-making process. The co-created collage artefact serves as a metaphorical representation of our imaginative response-ability as academics to engage with the polycrisis in different forms and formats, and to draw on the funds of others to reflect, share, dialogue, read, and reread to push us to the limits of who we are, what we know, and how we want to be.

Learning with Arts-Inspired Reflexive Methods in a Polycrisis context—so what?

We identified three learning layers facilitated by our arts-based methods: recognising, acknowledging, and enacting. We also noted how we had symbolically positioned our own hands in different ways throughout our study—a thread that linked our learning across the study.

Recognising what Academic Work Means in a Higher Education Setting

We have come to realise that we are part and parcel of, and complicit in, the disembodiment of academics’ work. The three panels in Linda’s conference image (Figure 2) show how disembodied we are in the polycrisis context—particularly the middle panel of the image where the hand is severed from the rest of the body as well as separated from the other two panels, which show images of our natural world. We are entangled in—and not separate from—the higher education polycrisis. However, as academics from different education fields and research interests, we saw the need to collaboratively move away from being disgruntled and focused on the doom and gloom of our polycrisis context.

Our study commenced by concentrating on our self-created images and found tanka poems, and gradually worked towards being more collaborative when we co-created a found tanka and finally, co-created a collage. During the collage creation process, we collaboratively worked with our minds, hands, and bodies, and this was a magical, enriching experience where we transformed our thinking into producing a material art piece. The collaborative process provided us with opportunities to discuss our upbeat emotional transformation insights and simultaneously see the silver lining of the dark polycrisis context. We realised that we could enhance artful scholarship to keep abreast of polycrisis.

We also noticed, identified, and recognised our hands as symbolically signalling a significant part of this co-creative, co-reflexive self-study. Our hand depictions were centred as focal points in our individually created images for the conference poetry performance. Furthermore, these hand illustrations are symbolically connected to agency. For example, in Daisy’s painting reflection (Figure 1), she linked the placement of her hands in her painting to the importance of her agency in higher education. The academic portrayed in the painting is seen as possessing agency that rests in her hands. The naked, vulnerable female academic appears to be holding the leafy branches as a natural barrier to protect herself from her naked vulnerability as an academic working within a polycrisis context.

Acknowledging Our Response-Ability as Academics

In this deeper layer, we build on recognising our tensions and entanglements to acknowledge our ethical responsibility towards our academic work in our troubled higher education context. After reflecting on each other’s images and poems, we individually created two tanka. The title of one of Linda’s tanka is “In the Palm of My Hands.” This metaphorical expression developed from her perception that her hands could take up and act on what she had recognised as important to further her learning. Furthermore, in our co-created tanka, we selected “difference in hand” as the central, pivotal line (where a change in our actions was envisaged). We intend to apply “oppositional consciousness” by accepting the regrettable polycrisis in our academic work context as a form of “positive resistance” (Braidotti, 2010, p. 44).

Enacting Positive Resistance

Superimposed on the other two learning layers is this material, practice-based, momentary, opportunity for looking beyond what exists now. We were involved in making real our academic response-ability to take charge and be abreast of the polycrisis. In addition to having painted or drawn images and created poems, we extended our learning by purposefully co-creating a collage. We chose to use a slow, tentative, hands-on, organic, traditional process to create a collage to collaboratively figure out how to create an artwork that best served as a symbolic, tangible object for reflection on our abstract, cloistered bodily feelings amidst the polycrisis. We made our learning real by producing an artwork that focused on the complexity of everyday lived experiences within the polycrisis and the potentiality for being different as academics in higher education. For example, with the collage image of resilient succulents growing on a rock placed on a hard cement paving, we illustrated that there are possibilities for learning and academic growth when faced with a situation where a rock and a hard place appear to be the only options. We drew on a few of the myriad opportunities offered by co-creative artwork to learn whilst thinking in step with the polycrisis context of higher education.

By recognising, acknowledging, and enacting our academic work as artful research, learning and scholarship, it was possible to create our own unique, liveable and positive interpretation of our academic experiences in the higher education context. We used art forms to assist us in questioning, explaining, visualising, and deepening our understandings in our academic context. We benefited from artful creations that provided co-reflexive possibilities and pathways to share and connect with our emotions. These pathways assisted us in understanding and coming to terms with our internal emotional fires of academic work in step with our contexts. In addition to developing enriching learning experiences, using artwork in our study proved valuable in enhancing and nourishing our collegial academic friendship. It provided a setting and space to dialogue in a calm, supportive, and compassionate atmosphere. We gained confidence from the openness and freedom of artistic expression. We thoroughly enjoyed using artful methods that facilitated open and frank engagement with our experiences, concept understandings, and learning in the context of higher education polycrisis.

How is Our Artful Inquiry Enabling Us to Work Abreast the Polycrisis in Higher education—and Why Does This Matter?

Circling back to our guiding questions, “What does our artful knowing make visible about academic work in the higher education polycrisis context?” “How do we poetically acknowledge our response-ability as academics working within the polycrisis?” “What does our co-creative artmaking produce as positive resistance?” and “Why does this matter?” pushed us to think about where we are right now and to question the enduring academic practices we have become comfortable with in our everyday lives as academics. Our artful engagements and representations with our academic world pushed us to the limits of what we know and how we live at the edge of thought—the edge of becoming different while simultaneously entangled in the polycrisis.

We now better understand ourselves as ethically response-able academics who can engage in different and affirmative ways to resist, and to transform our way of thinking within the polycrisis beyond narrow definitions of dark times. We hope this glimpse into the potential of the arts will nudge other academics to consider different ways to imagine how to make space for thinking creatively amidst the polycrisis in higher education. Exploring what can be experienced differently—in our lecture halls, in the curriculum, and within higher education spaces—requires creative and conceptual courage.