Collaborative Writing as Bio‐Digital Quilting: A Relational, Feminist Practice Towards “Academia Otherwise”

Abstract

In this article, we explore how quilted poetry as methodology, through the practice of collaborative writing, can help us to attune to and think with what is un/seen, un/heard, and un/spoken in our bio‐digital ways of working, as a way of resisting normative, exploitative practices in the neoliberal academia. We are a group of academics with different journeys and localities, connected by a common interest in the effects of boundaries, the dynamics of power, and the desire to do things differently. Drawing on our daily mundane encounters with/in both virtual and physical spaces of academia, including Teams meetings, Outlook emails, Google documents, and Miro board collaborations, we write quilted poetry with fragments of precarious matter: silences, messages, rhythms, feelings, and materialities. We attend to the entanglement of our bodies and their enmeshment in technology and share how bringing relational, feminist theories and the bio‐digital together has helped us to both materialise new patterns of relations and enact a more ethical approach to working in academia.

Keywords

• academia otherwise
• assemblage
• bio‐digital
• diffraction
• post‐digital
• precarious kin
• quilted‐poetry
• relations
• response‐ability