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Relational Reading~Writing~Thinking~Becoming in Higher Education: Possibilities for scholarly reading and writing in times of turbulence


Belinda Verster
Carolien van den Berg
Karen Collett

Abstract

The paper explores our scholarly practice of collaborative academic writing by engaging with a Relational Reading of Text approach and Slow scholarship. It grew out of our need to explore the tensions and inertia in our collaborative writing before, during, and after the COVID-19 lockdown, to find our way back to flourishing and thriving through each other. We draw on the relational reading~writing~thinking~becoming dimensions of ‘sense of movement’, ‘shifts to the in-between spaces of meaning’, ‘the quality of kindred’, and ‘shared responsibility’. A collaborative autoethnographic approach was used in relation to the notion of diffraction. We conceptualise a ‘pandemic-transformed’ approach for us to not only survive the digital turn our co-writing practices have taken but to find our way back to an authentic, creative, and joyful engagement. Insights may be of value to other academics who seek to co-write in ways that support flourishing and Slow scholarship in higher education.


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eISSN: 2310-7103