Upcoming Dates
- Tue, 10th October 2023: kick-off meeting – details TBA
Please contact us for Zoom details.
Our activities
- We build community by
- curating and facilitating events,
- offering resources, tools, and infrastructure for self-organised member activities,
- hosting a community platform (TBA) for communication, networking, and knowledge exchange,
- sending a regular newsletter to share what’s going on in and around the community.
- We help catalyse and support collaborative projects that emerge from the community.
- We practise together with a focus on contemplative, scientific, collaborative, embodied, co-creative, participatory methods.
Our formats
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.
Council
In our Council sessions, we practice storytelling and mindful listening to dive deeper into themes of our shared concern. A “Council” is an intentional space that we set together, based on mindful presence, sharing stories from personal experience, deep listening, witnessing, and confidentiality.
Mindful Co-creation
Applying a mindful attitude to co-creation practices, we intend to explore the current interests and foster the creative potential of our community and its members. Following such shared inquiry, we also intend to harvest and apply the insights from our collective practices to develop our community further.
We are a community of practice born from the connection between individuals who share a common need: cultivating the human aspects of our professional lives. Is this going to become a concrete vision for a different “academia”? How will this community evolve and what will be its purposes? What specific practices, projects and initiatives want to emerge from or evolve in this ecosystem?
Through a series of co-creation sessions, we can cultivate our skills as participant-researchers who explore established and novel ways of co-designing and inquiry, supported by a contemplative attitude.
Further recommendations
Mindful Writing Groups
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.”
See also this Facebook page for the Mindful Writing Groups.
Earlier formats
From late 2020 until early 2022, we also offered the following formats, some of which were co-created by our community – thereby also cultivating our skills as practitioners and co-facilitators:
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.
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.”