Academia does not change by responsibilising individuals, pressuring them to work harder, become more resilient, or learn to cope better under pressure. We firmly believe in a Positive Academia Collective Transformation, in which change occurs through everyday ways of organizing together – for instance, in meetings, emails, research, teaching, mentoring, and decision-making.
‘Changing Together’ is a collective campaign that invites academics at all career stages to shift our academic culture not through grand reforms, but through small, shared changes in practices. Culture changes when shared norms and values shift, when taken-for-granted habits are disrupted, and when alternative ways of knowing and working become collectively practiced rather than merely imagined.
In this campaign, we build on our Every Little Action Campaign, which focused on micro-practices, and use the process model that we developed in our paper on The Fables of The Academic Zoo – De-Legitimizing Dominant Micro-Practices through Storytelling and Caring. We are posing the question – how do we organize academia differently, together?
Our campaign runs for 52 weeks, with one prompt for each week. Each prompt invites an organizational collective – whether it is a department, research team, doctoral cohort, or informal network – to identify habits and patterns, voice them together, experiment with them, and initiate the reimagination of alternative ways of organizing.
We are committed to not holding individuals responsible for bearing the cost of a neoliberal system alone. But we can create ripples in this system by changing how we organize our practices together. Change, therefore, is not something that happens to us or the system but something we practice together!