C.11: Gender and Geography: Co-authoring feminist and queer geographies 2

The contribution offers an immersion in the experience of reflexive co-authorship we shared during two writing retreats in a home by the sea in Sardinia, in Summer 2023 and Winter 2024. It is a narration from intimate moments when as precarious researchers we explored, from a transfeminist Southern European perspective, the entanglement of our academic and political selves, our friendship and our queerness. We recognise in the co-authorship shared between friends, embodied on our academic lives, a tool to care and resist the individualisation and isolation of the neoliberal academia. We envisage this form of co-authorship as a way to acknowledge academic violence, and a reflexive practice to prevent us from reproducing it. Therefore, we question the hypothesis that co-authorship could turn into a method to recognise and resist the potential oppressor that lies within us and to fight it. 

Finally, this contribution is also a statement of the challenges and rewards of friendship, collective writing, identity and queer relations in the contemporary academy, and offers a glimpse into how the process of co-authorship can become a tool to strengthen the connections between individuals and create a new collective subject.

This presentation reflects on co-authorship and collaborative writing practices—as a non-native speaker of English working in the US academy. Writing with colleagues has taught me to think of co-authoring as a feminist practice of care that allows for mentoring, mutual support, and collaborative learning. Two examples serve to illustrate this point, beginning—and with deep gratitude to my co-authors—with the writing of Staeheli et al. 2012. I then turn to what two (earlier career) colleagues and I have come to call ‘our pandemic project,’ an exercise in very slow scholarship. Located in the US, the UK, and in China, and affected by various lockdown policies, our weekly online writing meetings became spaces to report on obstacles, and frequently the (my!) failure to produce text, given other professional demands. Conversations about obstacles to writing made space for broader discussions about (slow) scholarship, mentoring, teaching, and work in the academy more broadly. These weekly ‘writing’ meetings produced a manuscript that (among others) explicitly addresses the practice and politics of writing, and simultaneously produced spaces of sanity during the varied stresses of pandemic lockdowns, new positions, and the challenges of administration.

The presentation closes with a summary of how experiences with co-authoring motivate my work as a journal editor and my commitment to teaching a publications workshop. The latter is a feminist practice of care aimed at fostering community around writing, and intended to broaden access and inclusivity for students without prior exposure to the academy and for non-native speakers.

Staeheli, L., P. Ehrkamp, H. Leitner, and C. Nagel (2012) 'Dreaming the ordinary: Daily life and the complex geographies of citizenship', Progress in Human Geography, 36 (5), pp. 627-643. 

Academia can often be a competitive environment characterized by unequal power dynamics and feelings of isolation. Building alliances among researchers of different ages and career stages becomes particularly relevant for fostering not only professional but also personal growth. This paper engages in a dialogue initiated by four feminist researchers in the Catalan context, each representing different generations yet, united by their shared focus on feminist geographies as a converging point. The discussion delves into the nuanced construction of friendship and mentorship in academia, drawing insights from our diverse lived experiences, but also from our common points. Some of the discussed themes include Geography as an interdisciplinary field of encounter and its evolution across generations, the intergenerational and supervision relationships, the reflection of evolving hierarchies over time, the continuity of knowledge as new generations build upon their predecessor’s work, the collaborative and careful environment among scholars, the importance of emotional and economic support, and, the creation of intergenerational spaces. By engaging in a conversation from four distinct perspectives, we show how certain aspects, typically undervalued in a fiercely competitive academic system for their perceived lack of productivity, actually support networks and contribute to the gentle companionship of everyday life. This paper emphasizes the significance of supportive mentorship bonds, shedding light on the essential role these bonds play in promoting success and inclusivity within neoliberal and Anglo-centric academia. We aim to bring clarity by discussing caregiving practices to uphold them in a challenging context and thereby contribute to the pedagogies of hope.

We are two white European women under thirty with backgrounds in political and environmental system science, currently pursuing PhDs in geography at different European universities. Apart from the fact that we are both researching food-related topics using creative methods in Latin America, we have found common ground in the understanding that research is a collaborative endeavor that cannot be done alone. 

We will share how we are working to build the academic spaces we crave. By joining forces, we try to creatively counteract our feeling of isolation resulting from lacking support within our institutions and the academic system's indifference to the well-being of (early-career) researchers. With other PhD women from different countries in the Global North, diverse in languages and academic backgrounds, we create a safe space to monthly reflect on our emotions and feelings. Beyond this community, the two of us decided to put joint research into practice by starting a collaborative research project on the role of bodies and sounds in everyday food practices.

Our work relies on feminist practices, including critical self-reflection, body mapping and shared community cooking. Furthermore, we systematically write down how we feel throughout the collaborative research process and explore our emotions through collective mapping. To support each other, we physically meet in different locations, often far away from our university contexts. However, the "spaceless/virtual space" of online meetings and Whatsapp is also essential to our community. Through these practices, we try to find happiness, sorority and hope in our academic lives.

For more than 20 years, we – the co-authors – have shared numerous academic, social and activist spaces. Together and separately, we have built lives and careers being feminist killjoys (Ahmed 2023), calling out and challenging sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism and ableism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’ with feminist geographers’ focus on the politics of knowledge production, we: 1) explain the ways in which our co-authoring is dependent on – and facilitates – the creation of supportive spaces; 2) highlight how our co-authoring has shifted and changed over time and place; and, 3) bring to the surface the challenges and opportunities of our co-authoring process. In this presentation we critically reflect on our experiences starting as members of the University of Waikato Geography Department, then moving onto other roles and places in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our co-authoring practice and feminist killjoy solidarity is, therefore, co-created and stretched across time, places and intersectional concerns.

Ahmed, S. (2023) The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Allen Lane: Dublin Ireland.