Upcoming Dates
- TBA
Please contact us for Zoom details.
Our formats
In our practice sessions, we cultivate our skills as practitioners and co-facilitators of formats that are being co-created by our community. These include contemplative, scientific, embodied, co-creative, and participatory practices.
Listening Circles
In our Listening Circles, we practice diving deeper into the themes of our shared inquiry. The circle is an intentional space that we set together, based on mindful presence, sharing stories from personal experience, deep listening, witnessing, and confidentiality.
Mindful Presentations
In our Mindful Presentations format, 1-3 researchers give short presentations, followed by an open conversation (in the spirit of Listening Circles). Instead of “ordinary presentations” that we usually give to academic peers, these short talks invite our deeper reflections on why and how we care about our research, as well as our non-academic ventures, ambitions, motivations, inspirations, contemplative practices, and questions in life that matter to us.
Stepping deeper into our work or branching off into new directions tends to involve uncertainty. With this format, we want to offer a place to (joyfully, calmly, wildly, rigorously) support each other to experiment and test-run reflections that depart from the “typical academic discourse” of our specific home-disciplines.
Mindful Co-creation
This is a new and emergent process format, through which we intend to explore how to harvest and apply insights from collective practices to develop our community. We are a community of practice born from the connection between individuals who share a common need: cultivating the human aspects of their professional life. Is this going to become a concrete vision for a different “academia”? How will this community evolve and what will be its purpose? Do we even have to go anywhere?
We believe the best way to explore these and other questions is through co-creating our community with the support of collective practices and a contemplative as well as an empirical attitude (we are researchers after all!). How can we do this? Let’s bring our skills, experience and minds together and find out!
In practice, we have started piloting a series of co-creation instances where we can all be participant-researchers who explore ways of co-designing, supported by a contemplative attitude. In these sessions we also experiment with, and reflect on, methods to harvest insights from our collective practices to inform our co-creation process.
Open Conversation
These meetings are gently facilitated open spaces for welcoming new members, reconnecting with each other, and engaging in open conversation on themes that participants bring. Structure, flow, and themes are more emergent in these community gatherings.
Playful Academic
The “Playful Academic” sessions are facilitated by our member Annika Lübbert:
“The playful academic is all about drawing from diverse resources to support alive inquiry and collaboration. You can imagine the 1.5 hours as a series of games that involve explorations of space, writing and reading, as well as reflections on your intentions, motivation or desired outcomes. And while this may sound like a lot, each element is intended to be light and easy.”
Further recommendations
We also highly recommend the Mindful Writing Group sessions that are being co-hosted by our member Dara James:
“Sessions open with everyone setting a writing goal and a mindful goal, then the facilitator leads a short mindfulness practice. The group then writes/works in silence. The last 15 minutes everyone debriefs about their progress towards their writing/working and mindful goals. All sessions close with another short mindfulness practice.”
The current Mindful Writing Group schedule for Fall 2022 extends from August 29th – December 9th.