Building Communities in Academia

Academia is a metacommunity encompassing a wide diversity of sub-communities. Emerging researchers often feel a sense of liminal belonging to such communities: not quite yet inside and at the same time not wholly outside of academia. This chapter uses autoethnographic vignettes (personal accounts) in which members of a fledging research group reflect on the dynamics of establishing a community of practice (CoP), as they transition out of a master's degree programme at a university in Sweden. The group began working together during coursework within the master's programme and continues to ‘hang together’ as a CoP, undertaking collective research projects. An analysis of the vignettes reflects the group members' individual and collective understandings of the notions of ‘community’ and ‘participation’ in research practice. The vignettes demonstrate: (a) that the group members, who felt they each had the agency to legitimately participate, have come to actively learn that educational research is an endeavour of mutual engagement (b) that sustaining a community involves navigating multiple identities, often with associated vulnerabilities and (c) that peripheral participation in research communities can be understood in terms of both responsibility (at the group level) and structure (in relation to academia as a metacommunity). Their experience flips the normative positionalities of ‘novices at the periphery’ and ‘experts at the nucleus’. Overarchingly, the authors encourage practices of ‘inviting in’ and supporting new researchers coming to academia.

Graduate researchers constitute an important part of academia. However, they often feel disconnected from their peers due to the individual nature of graduate research. Research has suggested that feeling part of a community enhances the student experience and fosters a range of soft skills that complement the technical skills developed through research. When supported by their institutions, graduate researchers can contribute to creating a nurturing and stimulating environment for themselves and their peers in various ways, one of which includes developing and leading community-building projects driven by their needs. In this chapter, we reflect on our experience as graduate researchers who designed, developed and delivered professional development projects for our peers, with the aim to build a stronger intellectual community at our institution. Additionally, we offer practical guidance for graduate researchers who wish to develop their own project to strengthen graduate research communities.

Postdoctoral fellowships are an important career phase for early career researchers. This part of one's career is often characterised by stress, loneliness and anxiety about the future. Moreover, postdoctoral fellowships are, by definition, individualistic and career oriented. We ask: how do postdoctoral fellowships provide the means for an academic sense of belonging – if they do? In this chapter, we explore this complex question by introducing two personal narratives of navigating the spaces of belonging (and not belonging) during postdoctoral fellowships. First, the first author (Juuso) explores his experiences as a fellow in two postdoctoral programmes. Next, the second author (Robyn) provides a supervisor's reflection. We analyse these narratives with the theoretical lens of a sense of belonging, understood as an affective, physical, social and political phenomenon. Our narratives shed light on how belonging is built within postdoctoral fellowships' often cold and lonely structures. We particularly discuss the spaces of non-belonging that might simultaneously empower and disempower postdoctoral fellows (as well as their supervisors).

In this chapter, we delve into our journey of establishing and nurturing a global network comprising early- and mid-career women researchers in the realm of doctoral education. Formed and sustained amid the backdrop of the pandemic since 2020, our endeavours of community building have acquired unique attributes, rewards and trials. We begin by tracing the evolution of our collective journey and the collaborative process that has shaped this network. This, in turn, will spotlight the driving forces and expectations that underpinned the birth of this international alliance tailored for aspiring mid-career women researchers. We also delve into the fundamental characteristics of the network and consider the benefits it offers to its members. Lastly, we will address the challenges the network faces, particularly regarding its sustainable development in the context of competitive, academic work environments.

Our chapter explores the benefits of informal academic communities by focusing on the Finland-based early career higher education researchers' network (ECRN). Established two years ago, the ECRN primarily operates through monthly online coffee meetings. Via dialogical reflections by the authors and a qualitative inquiry into the ECRN, we explore the ECRN's role in its members' professional growth and well-being. We provide a narrative vignette of an imagined online coffee meeting to illustrate the significant peer-learning conversations in the ECRN. Based on our dialogical approach, we conclude that the ECRN is beneficial for its members' professional growth and well-being as it provides peer support, information sharing, scholarly support and higher education research-related support. Hence, we call for academia to better recognise and support informal academic communities as they have the potential to nourish a more collaborative working culture in academia.

In this chapter, which functions as a workbook, we provide the tools for science-oriented participant-driven community building to foster the well-being of researchers, such as mental health peer networks. The target audience of the workbook includes researchers, community managers, consortium project and grant managers, researcher developers and support staff members. We cover intentional aspects of community building, such as questions that can help formulate the potential community's values, mission and vision. We propose a framework for devising a plan and to-do list to create a community, with examples of how to look for members of the community, the best ways to communicate with them, how to identify allies, how to apply for an internal budget and how to create the community structure.

The increasingly pressured environment of academia has led to many toxic manifestations within sector cultures, such as hyper-competitiveness, erosion of research integrity, workforce attrition and increasing instances of burnout. The aim of The Research Whisperer (RW) blog is to level the research career playing field by providing honest, informed and compassionate perspectives about contemporary academia that reaches across institutions and internationally. We seek to counter the pervasive negativity with alternative perspectives on academic life that are realistic and prioritise kindness, generosity and a holistic approach to valuing research and researchers. The blog and its associated social media channels have cultivated a significant community of international researchers and research support professionals. This chapter discusses RW's strategies in growing and managing its global researcher community (through blog posts, social media, workshops and conferences), issues around its sustainability and what having such a community means.

This chapter examines the value of an academic community as a space in which competing imperatives of collaboration and solo research may not only coexist but also interplay productively. It will critically analyse how developing collaborative practices within an unaffiliated research collective (Beyond Gender) has provided vital tools for building an interdisciplinary academic community within Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE). While the merits of cross-disciplinary collaboration and networking continue to be invoked in institutional strategic plans, academic reward systems continue to favour individual outputs and sole authorship. With researchers increasingly struggling with heavy workloads, it can be challenging to argue that the time and energy required to create and sustain meaningful professional networks is worthwhile. In this chapter, I demonstrate, however, that academic research is rarely the product of an individual. I advocate for collaborative working as a means of diversifying research knowledge and generating adaptable ways of working. I illustrate this by demonstrating how involvement in Beyond Gender has generated research activity at SRHE. It is increasingly acknowledged that mattering and belonging are helpful to our understanding of higher education and to creating effective learning spaces (Gravett, 2023; Carruthers Thomas, 2019). This chapter aligns with this growing area of scholarship, showing that mattering and belonging fostered through academic community building supports creativity and innovation in research.

In this chapter, we unpack what we experienced during the process of facilitating a group of early career researchers, and how we feel an approach to ‘humanising academia’ may have helped at least us to envision higher education not in terms of the struggle it is often depicted as but as a community and a safe space. Setting out with a conscious naivety, either ignoring (Taina) or ignorant of (Andrew) the ways things ‘should be done’ in academia, allowed us to start a critically supportive community of researchers. This chapter explores how this approach allowed us to engage with different modes of being together and to reconsider existing forms of togetherness. This ‘being together’ was related not only to academic hierarchies and positions but also to thinking, feeling and experiencing. Using lenses from affect theory and queer studies, we discuss how, without quite meaning to, we developed an ‘affective community’ of those interested in discovering alternative ways to approach the international dimension of higher education. This shows how enacting ideals of community can bring us to build a community beyond hierarchies and competition.