May Nasrawy and Suda Perera

Since we’ve been teaching at Sussex, it’s felt like we’ve been in a state of perma-crisis: Strikes, pandemics, financial losses, have all contributed to a sense that we are on the brink of imminent disaster and we need to react quickly to avert an impending collapse. In this context a lot of pressure is put on as individual academics to do more and more with less and less. We need to teach more students and give them extra support even though there are fewer resources. We need to bring in more grants even though funding sources are shrinking, and publish more research in an increasingly narrowing field of “world leading” journals. Failure to do this, we are told, is an existential threat to the University and could result in more job losses, including our own. This sense of existential dread has meant that many of us feel like hamsters in a wheel – desperately scrambling from one task to the next in an attempt to just keep going and hope that eventually things will calm down. But the calm never seems to come, and in this highly individualised and reactionary wheel of toxic productivity, we seem to have lost a sense of community and belonging. In this blog we consider: Where in this endless cycle of work and crises is there space to think and reflect on why we’re doing this both as individuals and as a community? How can we break the vicious cycle of individualism and reaction and instead foster an environment where there is space to think and reflect in a collective and collaborative way to build the kind of University that we want?

By participating in the Conversations for Teaching for Community and Belonging, we have come to realise that there is a community of like-minded staff members who feel similarly , and that the answer to these questions begins with time and space. Time to step away from the hamster wheel of toxic productivity. Space to reflect on our individual identities and sense of purpose. Space to support and be supported by our colleagues. And from that space to foster a wider sense of community and belonging. This space requires us to have protected and meaningful time to just think and discuss with each other these bigger-picture and wider issues, which are not easily captured in bureaucratic processes. So much of the day-to-day running of the university relies on labours of caring and collegiality, and yet so much of this labour is hidden and not celebrated or even spoken about. We don’t want these spaces to be just one-off lip-service events or individualised awards, but rather collective spaces to talk through issues and share experiences with no expectation of a measurable output. By setting aside time for reflection, we argue we can move away from these feeling of constant reaction to immediate crises.

In the short time that we’ve had to engage in conversations with one another in this small project, we have been able to learn about what colleagues across faculties are doing in their teaching and research, and also share experiences that are point to issues of both concern and hope. We have been able to foster a sense of openness precisely because there is no sense that we are in competition for some sort of reward at the end, or that we have to produce something to demonstrate “value for money”. While we appreciate that much of what we do on the hamster-wheel of productivity is part of the job, we argue that it shouldn’t take up all the space, and should not be moving us away from other essential elements of our practice that require us to slow down to reflect, learn, collaborate, feel, care, read, and think.