Juggling academic practice and care: collaborative autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group

The Qualitative Report The Qualitative Report Volume 29 Number 4 Article 6 4-1-2024 Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group Autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU , asuncion.mar[email protected] Aingeru Gutierrez-Cabello University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU , [email protected] Estibaliz Aberasturi-Apraiz University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU , [email protected] Jose M. Correa-Gorospe University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU , [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr Part of the Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, and the Social Statistics Commons Recommended APA Citation Recommended APA Citation Martínez-Arbelaiz, A., Gutierrez-Cabello, A., Aberasturi-Apraiz, E., & Correa-Gorospe, J. (2024). Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group. The Qualitative Report , 29 (4), 968-985. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2024.6627 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The Qualitative Report at NSUWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Qualitative Report by an authorized administrator of NSUWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Autoethnography within a Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group Basque University Research Group Abstract Abstract Many university scholars, including the authors of this article, acknowledge that they feel like they are riding an emotional roller coaster with academic success, as well as many project failures. Except for our PhD thesis, many of us complete our research tasks in relatively established research groups. However, little research has examined the potential these groups might have to mitigate feelings of academic isolation. To fill in this gap, we designed two methodological steps. First, we adopted the Woolfian metaphor of a room of our own, where we composed individual vignettes regarding our feelings of isolation. We read each other's texts and then, in a second step, moved to a “living room” to negotiate our emerging ideas, echoing a Collaborative Autoethnography. Two full professors and two early-career researchers reflected on and talked about their feelings of academic isolation, from their personal and professional standpoints. Despite the differences in job stability, the four participants acknowledged having felt isolated and abandoned. We argue that viewing research groups not as a community of practice, but a community of care is a more humane and desirable framework to model university research groups in these current times of exacerbating neoliberalism. Keywords Keywords academic practice, communities of practice, collaborative autoethnography, ethics of care Creative Commons License Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Acknowledgements Acknowledgements We thank Wendy Baldwin for her editing help and particularly for making sure that the English translation kept the same register and tone as the original vignettes. This article is available in The Qualitative Report: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol29/iss4/6 The Qualitative Report 2024 Volume 29, Number 4, 968-985 https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2024.6627 Juggling Academic Practice and Care: Collaborative Autoethnography within a Basque University Research Group Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz, Aingeru Gutiérrez-Cabello Barragán, Estibaliz Aberasturi-Apraiz, and José Miguel Correa Gorospe University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU Many university scholars, including the authors of this article, acknowledge that they feel like they are riding an emotional roller coaster with academic success, as well as many project failures. Except for our PhD thesis, many of us complete our research tasks in relatively established research groups. However, little research has examined the potential these groups might have to mitigate feelings of academic isolation. To fill in this gap, we designed two methodological steps. First, we adopted the Woolfian metaphor of a room of our own, where we composed individual vignettes regarding our feelings of isolation. We read each other's texts and then, in a second step, moved to a “living room” to negotiate our emerging ideas, echoing a Collaborative Autoethnography. Two full professors and two early-career researchers reflected on and talked about their feelings of academic isolation, from their personal and professional standpoints. Despite the differences in job stability, the four participants acknowledged having felt isolated and abandoned. We argue that viewing research groups not as a community of practice, but a community of care is a more humane and desirable framework to model university research groups in these current times of exacerbating neoliberalism. Keywords: academic practice, communities of practice, collaborative autoethnography, ethics of care Introduction Isolation, loneliness, solitude. Pop singer Rigoberta Bandini’s song, “In Spain we call it Soledad,” reminds us that this may be a universal feeling with a local flavor. To our Spanish ear, the noun soledad has a negative connotation. For an outgoing and gregarious society like ours, being alone is perceived as a flaw more than as an advantage. In English, however, the three terms have very distinct nuances. The literature on education and management uses the term isolation, defined as a state of feeling disconnected and apart from other human beings (Belkhir et al., 2019). We believe there is a fine line between a useful, necessary, and pleasant feeling of being without other human beings to write, concentrate or just read and an uncomfortable and paralyzing sense of being disconnected from the academic world. The right balance between being a part of a group and enjoying moments of solitude (but not of soledad!) is a very personal and probably, a culturally mediated endeavor. In the privacy of their solitude, university professors think, initiate projects, compose preliminary drafts of their reflections and develop them usually without unwelcome interruptions (Jandrić, 2022). Nevertheless, according to Braidotti (2014, p. 177) “untenured, part-time, sub-standard, underpaid work has become the norm in most advanced liberal economies''. This means that not everyone enjoys the financial and personal conditions to have a private research space, whatever physical form this space may take. Echoing our previous Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz et al. 969 research invoking Virginia Woolf (Aberasturi-Apraiz et al., 2020), we researchers can profit from a room of our own. However, even those of us privileged enough to go to a university office every morning acknowledge the need to share the ideas hatched in solitude. If the silence and peace of our private rooms are a fertile ground for ideas to emerge, it is in shared moving arenas where we can negotiate our proposals. This initially conceived individual knowledge must be discussed, modified, adapted and eventually adopted by a given academic community. Two years ago, during the pandemic, we published a paper where we unveiled the difficulties and feelings of vulnerability that we experienced as members of a research group when we started to revise and change our methodological choices (Aberasturi-Apraiz et al., 2020). At that time, we could not describe our research methodology in detail because we could not conceptualize it clearly, it was work definitely in progress. Now, thanks to the passage of time and our own discussions on methodology, we can express our ideas regarding our research options in a more articulate way. When reflecting on what it meant to us to change to a postqualitative approach to research (St. Pierre, 2021), we adopted and developed the metaphor of our private room. It is not the first time that the Woolfian metaphor is ascribed new meanings in qualitative research methodology. For three Australian PhD students and a professor, the productive metaphor of the room is the articulating piece in a performative article that addresses their academic and personal lives (Mackinlay et al., 2022). Taking the metaphor a step further, they write: We have won rooms of our own, attained leadership positions within our professions. But this freedom is only a beginning—the rooms are our own, but they are still bare. They have to be furnished; they have to be decorated; they have to be shared. How are you going to furnish your room, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think, are questions of the utmost importance and interest. [emphasis in the original] (Mackinlay et al., 2022, p. 340) These questions added not only a challenge but also an opportunity to reflect upon our goals, research methods, trajectories, impact and the future of our research group. Following Mackinlay et al. (2022), we discussed how we may furnish and decorate our own private rooms. However, the exercise of decorating our own rooms was not enough and it was when we left the solitude of our rooms and moved to the living room when our collaboration flourished. It is in this metaphorical shared space where we could discuss our past, present and future as a research group. Autoethnography was our initial methodological choice, but then we added to our toolbox the crucial and useful metaphor of the living room, as a way to address the need for dialogue and the negotiation of meaning. The purpose of our meetings in the living room was to discuss our individual texts on academic isolation and to reflect on the future choices and development of our research group. In sum, given that the literature so far has addressed the issue of solitude from the point of view of early-career researchers or scholars exclusively, we believe that there is a need to see how both novice and old-timers in academia interact with each other. Do both age-group scholars feel isolated? And if so, how do they cope with the uneasiness of being alienated? In order to answer these questions, we developed an innovative methodology akin to Collaborative Autoethnography that suited the spirit of our research group and emerged organically from simple metaphors of rooms and living rooms. This article is organized as follows. First, we review the few articles that discuss academic isolation in the context of the growing commodification of higher education. Then we describe the context, the history, the people, and the main goals of our research group. Then, we discuss the possibility of understanding our university-based research group as a 970 The Qualitative Report 2024 Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998). Against this theoretical backdrop, in section 4 we introduce our choice of methodology, Collaborative Autoethnography. Four members of the group—two full-time professors and two assistant professors—engaged in autoethnographic work and wrote an individual vignette in the solitude of their private rooms, as summarized in section 5. Then, we all met in the living room and enjoyed a couple of collaborative autoethnographic sessions to distill the main points that came out of considering not only the original prompt of academic isolation but the many related topics that emerged regarding our positioning in the research group. Finally, in section 6, we reimagine our research group as a “Community of Care” by incorporating the features and views developed in our living room. Restlessness and isolation at neoliberal universities The places where we conceive and perform research are not neutral and have considerable impact on our lives. Nordbäck et al. (2022) adopted collaborative autoethnography to investigate the work and life changes they experienced when the Aalto University merger took place. This research illuminates the challenges pushing contemporary academia toward a more business-oriented university, ending up in the commodification (Wilmott, 1995) or McDonaldization of higher education (Parker & Jary, 1995). By neoliberalism and its direct consequence, namely, commodification, we understand that academic knowledge is conceived as a commodity and the field of higher education as a factor of economic growth. In this sense, we echo the warning that Chomsky (2017) issued about the assault of neoliberalism on universities, modifying the regulatory frameworks and culture of their teaching staff, the privatization of public knowledge and the advance towards academic capitalism. A business model where what matters seems to become the baseline, where the true owners are the fiduciaries who seek to keep costs low and a permanently evaluated workforce redirected towards the search for productivity and which ends up becoming docile, obedient, and atomized, thanks in part to chronicling their condition as workers without stability. Given the merge and campus relocation experienced by the three Finnish academics, they note that “[o]ur identities (including identifying with social groups) are related to spaces and places, as we work remotely from home or commute to the university, enter its buildings, work in a dedicated (or not) office space, teach in lecture halls, and encounter people in open spaces, rooms, and hallways” (Nordbäck et al., p. 335). They convincingly show that physical places can enhance or hinder social interaction, an observation that is directly related to the initial topic of this article, namely, academic isolation. Through collaborative autoethnography, they show how researchers’ mutual engagement can help locate and make sense of their restlessness amidst the changes that their particular neoliberal university is experiencing. The Finnish university, like any other university, has not been able to escape the effects of the neoliberal logic and has experienced some building and location merging that has changed the lives of the three academics with campus relocation. Nordbäck et al. (2022) recommend that other scholars try to engage in dialogue with each other particularly in shared spaces, such as departments and universities, because “[i]t has helped us to learn about ourselves and others and to support each other in dealing with the atrocities of neoliberalism” (pp. 345-346). In this context of neo liberalization, these authors recommend supporting each other and engaging in collaboration and dialogue to make universities meaningful places after difficult times, such as the ones described in Aalto University. Belkhir et al. (2019) also address the feeling of isolation that arises among researchers in social sciences. By adopting the same methodology, namely, collaborative autoethnography as their methodological stance, they focus on how interdisciplinary research teams can be the appropriate frame for helping early-career researchers mitigate feelings of isolation as they traverse the path of becoming established academics. Belkhir et al. (2019) define isolation as Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz et al. 971 “an involuntary perceived separation from the academic field to which one aspires to belong, associated with a perceived lack of agency in terms of one’s engagement with the field” (p. 263). They posit that isolation manifests along four dimensions—geographical, cultural, relational, and technical—and conclude that “isolation is of increasing importance as contemporary academic careers have globalized” (p. 283). Paradoxically, the more global our academic activities become in terms of collaborations with colleagues all over the world, the more isolated these academics feel. In addition, they point to three areas that can combat isolation: mentoring, networking, and communities of practice. In Belkhir et al.’s (2019) article, however, we perceived a lack of attention to established academics. By established academics we mean tenured professors whose offices and workplaces crucially will not change the next future. In fact, Belkhir et al.’s 2019 publication is signed by four assistant professors, three lecturers, a PhD candidate, a postdoctoral researcher and a single recently tenured professor, from ten different European, Australian, African and American universities. We understand that focusing on early-career researchers is probably a natural choice adopted by many researchers (Jandrić, 2022), but it leaves out of scrutiny a large part of academia. The original characterization of a Community of Practice in Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) contends that the constant interaction and engagement among novices and old-timers is a necessary ingredient for any community to flourish and thus, be sustainable. In other words, the interaction of individuals from both situations (tenured and stable and untenured and in their initial stages of their careers) is required to build a healthy and enduring community of practice. Old-timers, the established, seasoned university researchers in our case, can generate new knowledge, but we also note the need for novices to engage in active negotiation with established scholars. These interactions, both formal and informal, give rise to new knowledge through meetings, abstract and research project writing, participation in conferences and article and book chapter writing (Hyland, 2000). These activities may expand the shared repertoire of the research group and crucially can become cement for its members. Like Peele-Eady and Moje (2020), we argue for “a view of a community that centers diverse groups of people working together for a common goal— even when perceptions of that goal differ—and making the most of difference in the process” (p. 230). In the next section we describe the nature of our research group against the backdrop of the theory of communities of practice. What is Elkarrikertuz? A research group as a community of practice? We have gone from questioning disciplinary limits and our own professional isolation, professors who work alone in universities without any referent, horizon, or support, to formally and informally questioning other dimensions related to race, language and gender, and trying to unveil many of the prejudices that were apparently very distant from what happens in our classrooms and should be part of our curriculum. (Correa et al., 2010, p. 127; translation by the authors) This quote comes from an article we published more than ten years ago, where we provided a description of the different phases the research group went through. In the conclusion of our article, we made it clear that the team was a motor for moving forward and overcoming our own professional isolation, as the above quote illustrates. Even though this article was written in Spanish, it surpasses the limits of language and adopts a multimodal perspective by narrating the research team’s inception and history through a comic strip. The text underlined the research group´s openness toward new forms of experimental and experiential research; ways of working that are at the margins and limits of knowledge legitimized by academia. Since its 972 The Qualitative Report 2024 inception Elkarrikertuz has paid attention to marginal, minority, subaltern, non-normative, and decolonial issues, becoming a political project linked to critical, and dissident pedagogies. It is pertinent to clarify that our research group, Elkarrikertuz, based in the School of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, chose a name that underscores the idea of “togetherness.” The name Elkarrikertuz comes from the combination of the two Basque words, elkarrekin “together” and ikertuz “by doing research.” Despite our apparent group’s resemblance to a community, the term Community of Practice (Wenger, 1998) has not been previously applied to it. Analyzing the nature of our group against the backdrop of the theory of Communities of Practice can be a fruitful journey to set our research goals and to find the means to achieve them. In this sense, we cannot apriori presuppose that a group of professors and graduate students that self-identify as researchers constitutes a Community of Practice (CoP from now on). There are some fundamental features that the literature (Leave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) has identified as conducive to the formation of a CoP. As King (2014) convincingly argues, “[o]ne cannot safely presume, however, that a random group of people constitutes a community of practice (with its own set of highly localised practices) merely because they are participating in an activity together on a regular basis or because they share a social identity” (p. 62). In our particular context, just because the members of our research group attend regular meetings, present in professional conferences, author or co-author conference presentations and publish papers in collaboration, we cannot assume that these individuals constitute a CoP. What are, thus, the necessary ingredients to call an aggregate of people a CoP? According to Wenger (1998, p. 184), three main elements must co-occur for a community to emerge. The first is that there must be mutual engagement, that is, the members must get together to engage in their shared practices. Crucially, this engagement must be time and place bound. Mutual engagement in our case can take the form of a meeting, which in turn can be harmonious or contentious. It can also be the writing of a grant proposal or an abstract for a conference, the attending and presentation at a conference, or the writing of articles and book chapters. The second ingredient of a CoP is the jointly negotiated enterprise. What seems clear is that the enterprise must be negotiated with by the members. It is interesting to note that Wenger leaves some room for agency, since the joint enterprise belongs to the members despite all the aspects that may be beyond their control. This is because it is a response that the members negotiate together, and it is based on their own understanding of their situation, even in cases where practice is profoundly shaped by external forces. Finally, the most tangible ingredient of the CoP theory is the development of a shared repertoire, defined as “routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions or concepts that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and which have become part of its practice” (Wenger, 1998, p. 83). The question is whether our university research group fits the definition of a CoP. Does it exhibit these three crucial elements? Let us analyze them one by one. Our research group and mutual engagement Some of the defining features of a CoP relate to sustained mutual relationships. It is important to point out that these relations are sometimes harmonious but also conflictual. As we mentioned above, this has been the case in our own experience. Relations become more conflictual and stressful particularly when adopting new forms of doing research and abandoning old and familiar ones. This was the case in our transition from doing narrative inquiry to doing post-qualitative inquiry during our learning trajectory as a community. Our vulnerabilities and internal difficulties were amply reported in Aberasturi-Apraiz et al. (2020), In this sense, Peely-Eady and Moje (2020) remind us that “communities are not always Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz et al. 973 agreeable; they can be (and should be) contentious spaces” (p. 234). These group-internal differences in our understanding of research methodological choices and goals manifest themselves during our research group meetings. Nevertheless, whether we were engaged in planning and preparing conference presentations or collectively writing, minimal agreement is required and eventually reached, for our own survival as a group. The group’s tasks and goals have to be accomplished despite its members’ differences and misalignments. Since we are more or less connected through social media where information can flow rapidly, in our group meetings there are usually very few preambles, and we go directly to the main point, with few formalities, which facilitates the needed engagement. Our research group and jointly negotiated enterprise Our website, designed by some of the members of the research group, states that the goal of the research group is the analysis of innovation and the improvement of education quality and learning contexts, prompted by the transformations in society. This is a very broad goal, and we agree with Peele-Eady and Moje (2020) when they propose that “communities are both real and imagined” (p. 233). In fact, the four members that contributed to this paper, and probably the remaining seventeen researchers in the group, have very different ideas of what constitutes the improvement of education quality in our community. These differences may simply be due to the heterogeneity of our academic backgrounds and related identities: some members come from the fine arts, others from education or from linguistics. In addition, it is clear that each member of the group interprets the group itself and its intended goals in his or her way. Far from being a problem, the diversity within our research group is an asset and we all know each other’s areas of expertise. The individual and collective goal is the advancement of the professional career of the group and the individual members. If one member gets tenure, then the whole group benefits from that person’s job stability. Our research group and shared repertoire The members in fine arts developed a distinct logo (see Figure 1) for our research group. This logo was a clear index of our identity as members of the research group and sits at the center of our website (see Figure 2), where all members' pictures and CVs can be found. Figure 1 Research Group`s Logo The website and the pictures have a casual and dynamic style that reflects our perspective on education. During our group meetings and during our unofficial lunches, we have coined and used jargon. This jargon is not understandable to anyone who has not been part of the research group for a while, and it is usually embedded in inside jokes. For example, only group members know what we mean by the Catalans, the post, the cuali, etc. In line with King (2014) ´s research framed in linguistic ethnography, we have developed a shared linguistic repertoire which mixes English, Spanish and Basque in seamless ways. 974 The Qualitative Report 2024 Figure 2 Research Group Web screenshots The website and the pictures have a casual and dynamic style that reflects our perspective on education. During our group meetings and during our unofficial lunches, we have coined and used jargon. This jargon is not understandable to anyone who has not been part of the research group for a while, and it is usually embedded in inside jokes. For example, only group members know what we mean by the Catalans, the post, the cuali, etc. In line with King’s (2014) research framed in linguistic ethnography, we have developed a shared linguistic repertoire which mixes English, Spanish and Basque in seamless ways. In sum, by tracing the three features of a CoP, namely, mutual engagement, jointly negotiated enterprise and shared repertoire, we have shown that our research group can be conceived as a CoP. Nevertheless, this model does not leave any room for the potential role that this community may have in mitigating feelings of isolation. To delve into this aspect of the CoP, four members of the research group engaged in collaborative autoethnography to further investigate this issue. The larger question we want to tackle in this article is the extent to which a research team such as ours, conceptualized as a CoP, can provide support in mitigating the feelings of academic isolation of its members, both novices and old-timers. To answer this question, we describe our methodological stance in the following section. CAE as a research method: On rooms and living rooms We turned to collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2016; Hernandez et al., 2017; Lapadat, 2017) to delve into our potential feelings of isolation and to discuss our awareness of the shape of our research team in times of neoliberalism. Collaborative Autoethnography (henceforth CAE) is a postmodern form of research (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013) that blurs the boundaries between researchers and subjects. Lapadat (2017, pp. 597-598) defined CAE as an “autobiographical, autoethnographic, polyphonic approach to writing, telling, interrogating, analyzing, and collaboratively performing and writing up research on personal life challenges and on negotiating personal and professional identities''. We chose CAE as our methodological stance for the following reasons. First, it allows us the freedom to describe our job and related endeavors with transparency; CAE is in line with our mentioned and published commitment to the post-qualitative forms of doing research (Aberasturi-Apraiz Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz et al. 981 (Young et al., 2022), we extend our previous conceptualization of a CoP and add some fundamental ingredients, so that the construct of a CoP can be conceptualized as a Community of Care. The additional features and actions that are required are detailed in Table 2, to extend the focus of care to our institutional context. The actual actions that constitute the Community of Care have been distilled from the text bolded in the actual vignettes in section 5. The initial of the researcher that has pointed to this particular action has been added next to it. Table 2 Main features and actions defining a Community of Care (CoC) and how they extend from the ones of a CoP Features Community of Practice actions Community of Care actions Mutual engagement ● Holding meetings ● Writing abstracts ● Writing conference presentations, articles and book chapters ● Similar involvement in all the tasks (E) ● Equal sharing of workload (E) ● Awareness and respect for family care (JM) ● Sharing papers and ideas (As) ● Sharing and discussing relevant research (As) ● Gathering socially (Ain/E) ● Encouraging leisure time (E) Jointly negotiated enterprise ● Paying attention to education at all levels ● Developing a career in academia ● Paying attention to all members’ physical and mental wellbeing, including project leaders when under deadline (JM/E) ● Writing collaboratively (As) ● Avoiding competition (E) ● Setting reasonable deadlines (Ain) Shared repertoire ● Group website ● Academic and ingroup jargon ● Inside (in-group) jokes ● Creating a common body of knowledge (proposals, theories, methodologies, data, references, relevant readings) (As) ● Using CAE as a research method (The four of us) In sum, the initial question of whether our research group can mitigate feelings of isolation, which prompted our reflections in the privacy of our individual rooms, has made us move beyond an emphasis on human relationships and pay attention to higher education politics and more-than-human relationships with time and spaces. In our CAE journey, we have sketched an imagined community in the form of a community of care that suits our research, professional, and personal goals, namely, a community that nurtures each one of its members through their academic lives. Even if we acknowledge that an invitation by established academics to join a research group can be a poisoned chalice that is difficult to resist (see José 982 The Qualitative Report 2024 Miguel´s vignette), once newcomers join the research group, their taking part in the routines outlined in Table 2 can function as the cement that coheres the group. Research members should be cognizant of the importance of building and nurturing personal relations in the process of completing research projects. Caring for these relations should be not only a goal but a defining feature of our research team. Much has been written on the ethics of research in autoethnography, at times focusing on the context where research is being produced (Dahal & Luitel, 2022). 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Managing the academics: Commodification and control in the development of university education in the U.K. Human Relations, 38(8), 1135-1149. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679504800902 Author Note Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3784-2266) is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education Education, Philosophy and Anthropology of the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (Spain) and a member of the Elkarrikertuz research group (IT1586-22). She has been the language coordinator for University Studies Abroad Consortium and a Spanish language teacher for more than twenty years. After COVID19 she jobs and started teaching at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU full time. Her research focuses on language acquisition, particularly in study abroad contexts, educational technology, literacy, and language pedagogy in general. Please direct correspondence to [email protected] Aingeru Gutiérrez-Cabello Barragán (ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-68411170) is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology of the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (Spain) and a member of the Elkarrikertuz research group (IT1586-22). His research activity focuses on youth learning, arts-based research and new materialisms. He has participated in projects related to the construction of the identity of Early Childhood Education teachers during initial training and the first years of work (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, EDU2010-20852-C02-02), as well as the learning of pre-school and primary school teachers (Ministry of Economy, Enterprise and Competitiveness, EDU2015-70912-C2-2-R). His latest project focuses on the learning trajectories of young university students (TRAY-AP, PID2019-108696RB-I00). Please direct correspondence to aingeru.gutierr[email protected] Estibaliz Aberasturi-Apraiz (ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7827-0850) has a BA in Fine Arts and a PhD in Educational Sciences. She is a full professor and researcher at the Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology of San Sebastian, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (Spain). The research and teaching career is mainly associated with teacher education, pedagogical innovation and research and learning of the visual arts in educational contexts. She is the principal Researcher at Elkarrikertuz (IT1586-22), the consolidated research group in the Basque university system researched in the present article. Please direct correspondence to [email protected] Jose Miguel Correa Gorospe (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6570-9905) is full professor at the Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and one of the funding members of the Elkarrikertuz research group (IT1586-22). His teaching and research activity focuses on initial and ongoing teacher Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz et al. 985 education, inclusivity, and digitalization from a posthuman and new materialist perspective. Like Aingeru and Estitxu, he has been part of the project TRAY-AP, PID2019-108696RB-I00, focusing on the learning trajectories of young university learners. He belongs to the REUNID network of educational innovation and research. Please direct correspondence to [email protected] Acknowledgement: We thank Wendy Baldwin for her editing help and particularly for making sure that the English translation kept the same register and tone as the original vignettes. Copyright 2024: Asunción Martínez-Arbelaiz, Aingeru Gutiérrez-Cabello Barragán, Estibaliz Aberasturi-Apraiz, José Miguel Correa Gorospe, and Nova Southeastern University. Article Citation Martínez-Arbelaiz, A., Gutiérrez-Cabello Barragán, A., Aberasturi-Apraiz, E., & Correa Gorospe, J. M. (2024). Juggling academic practice and care: Collaborative autoethnography within a Basque university research group. The Qualitative Report, 29(4), 968-985. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2024.6627