Sympoiesis ‘becoming with and through each other’: Exploring collaborative writing as emergent academics

This paper explores our journey as three female academics as we collaboratively engage in the process of writing for scholarly publication. We read our experience through a Political Ethic of Care, Slow scholarship, and Sympoiesis. Informed by Barad’s (2007) relational ontology of space~time~mattering we explore our process of collaborative writing. We trace our journey as emerging scholars in different environments and through different modalities and material entanglements. The paper contributes to an understanding of how emerging academics find and create opportunities to develop their scholarly practice through collaborative sympoietic relationships. We show how through an engaged and sustained Slow scholarship we were able to claim space and time to enliven our creativity and joy. This empowered us to meaningfully assert ourselves within the context of a neoliberal academic environment and to reimagine how socially just practices of scholarly writing could be realised in the‘belly of the beast’.

joy, and reconnecting in new ways. We draw on Barad's (2007) relational ontology of space~time~mattering which refers to the material entanglements which emerge in and through relationships between space, time and matter. Furthermore, we engage with Haraway's notion of Sympoiesis (2016) of becoming with and through each other and Tronto's Political Ethic of Care (2013). These lenses informed the way in which we worked and opened up spaces and possibilities for reimagining socially just academic writing.
We have drawn much inspiration from papers by Black, et al. (2017a) and Mountz, et al. (2015) who are also female academics who have explored ways in which to survive and thrive within the constraints of the neoliberal university. We were encouraged by their example to explore how our collective agency could be enriched through a caring and Slow collaborative relationship. Their commitment to the attentive practices of Slow scholarship form a feminist ethics of care provided us with a flight path to navigate our journey as emergent scholars. It also gave us the courage to collectively assert ourselves and challenge the status quo. Mountz, et al. argue that '[g]ood scholarship requires time: time to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, and collaborate ' (2015: 1237). They aver that within the demands of the neoliberal university Slow work is threatened, however, it also has the potential to defy the status quo. Carla Petrini (2007), the originator of the Slow Food Movement made explicit that Slow does not have to do with speed, but rather a thoughtful and attentive approach. Black, et al. (2017a) and Mountz, et al. (2015)  In working collaboratively we also drew inspiration from new materialist scholars such as Haraway (2016) and Neimanis (2012) whose work helped to give meaning to our collaborative processes of reading-writing-becoming in and through each other and our environments.
Collaborations are described by Neimanis as 'fruits of joint labours' arising from interactions of 'doing-in-common, more than a being-in-common ' (2012: 216). Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, she argues that collaborations are not 'new'; however, she reminds us to 'pay attention and to cultivate our collaborations-human and more-than-human-with more care ' (2012: 220).
This approach to collaboration stands in stark contrast to our work-live environment in the neoliberal university. We felt this most acutely with increasing job demands to publish and to innovate in our teaching and learning environments, as well as the need to access funding to support our research. Higher workload demands and decreasing resources for support added to our levels of stress as academics and working mothers. Like Barbara Godard (Sloniowski, 2013: 479) we 'juggled so much labour' (cited in Sloniowski, 2013: 479)  This verse from a poem by one of our members captures the essence of how these constraints, hampered our being as academic and emerging scholars: 'Tied and tethered ...Row upon marched row... pressed, pushed and prodded to produce' (CHEC, 2018: 20).
Feeling constrained and pressurised, we needed to find the spaces, places, and kin with which we could flourish and publish. This paper depicts the process of our connecting and caring, losing our joy, and reconnecting in new ways in our collaborative journey towards an academic scholarship. We became a professional, caring community with a shared interest in doing and being differently in our academic contexts. We shared the need to develop the agency to claim the time and space for engagement to build our collective strength to flourish and thrive through each other, different modalities, and material entanglements (Haraway, 2016). The three of us drew mindfully on Fisher and Tronto (1990) and Tronto's (2013)  includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web' (Fisher and Tronto, 1990: 40;Tronto, 1993: 40).

Connecting and caring
Below we comment on the relational forces that nurtured our inspiration.
'For a moment my world is in suspension...Covered in a blanket of care... it's making itself known to me' (CHEC, 2018: 20 Our practice of engagement through our weekly meetings helped us to claim the space and time to engage in Slow scholarship in order to collaboratively read, think and write. This practice challenged the dominant ethos of individualism, competition and isolation often experienced by emergent academics within patriarchal organisational cultures (Black, et al., 2017b;Mountz, et al., 2015;Ulmer, 2017). Academics are incentivised to publish on their own to receive higher subsidies; however, there are also contradictory messages that promote collaborative, interdisciplinary research at a policy level. These collaborative practices still tend to perpetuate a competitive, performative ethos, with little space for different modes of thinking and being with others. Practising Slow scholarship requires collaboration underpinned by ethical connections which affirm space for curiosity rather than critique, and valuing difference rather than sameness (Verster, et al., 2019). Chen, et al., drawing on a feminist new materialist ontology, avers that ollaboration is about being a part of a community-a feminist community that supports our scholarly and activist efforts, a human community that we want our efforts to serve, and a morethan-human community that shores up and calls out our work in other important ways' (2013: 120). Our shared interest in intentional collaborative, co-production, informed our response and efforts to push-back the neoliberal demands of higher education. Like Black, et al. (2017b) and Muntz, et al. (2015), we were taking action to practice caring, Slow attentive action informed by Tronto's (2013) Political Ethic of Care.
In our practice towards Slow scholarship, we drew insight and guidance from Barad's (2007) work on relational ontology to inform how we understood the ways in which our movements, thoughts and writing were enacted through space~time~mattering. Relationality is a key conduit for our ethico-onto-epistemological becomings-with encounters during which our affective energy is amplified. We experimented with different modes of thinking, reading, writing, and rewriting. We followed the suggestion of St Pierre: 'read, read, read and then 'do' the next thing that makes sense and keep doing the next thing and all that doing is a methodology' (2018: 619).
These spaces of working collaboratively in different environments and with different media enabled us to deeply explore our thinking-feeling-reading-writing-being and to generate new energy and possibility.
We were aware of the need to engage in a Slow methodology as a conscious act to enhance spaces for social justice. Our relationality was enhanced through Slow reading (Mikics, 2013), Slow writing (Ulmer, 2017), Slow looking, (Tishman, 2018), and what we refer to as Slow engagement and emergence. The emergence with and through each other and our environment is informed by what Haraway describes as sympoiesis'a worlding-with, in company' (2016: 58). Muntz, et al. (2015) argue that Slow offers a way of working and engaging that moves away from neoliberal higher education systems that valorise and prioritise measured outcomes and outputs.
We made a conscious effort to disrupt the hegemony of market-driven academia and rather attune our bodyminds to the affective space~time~mattering.

Becoming with and through each other and our environments
'becoming through multiple connections... letting go of the "I" the "me" the "we" ... beginning... beginning again' (CHEC, 2018: 20).
Through our weekly writing sessions through both face-to-face and online encounters, we experienced a deepening of our collaboration. Our writing and thinking seemed to grow rhizomatically (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). As layers of thinking, writing, and speaking became interwoven on the pages we experienced the 'I' become 'we' as our writing took form. We experience ourselves as a collectively-producing system with the sum becoming greater than the individuals or parts. Donna Haraway argues that '[n]othing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing' (2016: 58). Thus, sympoiesis encapsulates the process of being and becoming with and through others. Our reading-writing-becoming was enhanced through working in different modes and in different environments. Drawing out our ideas through walking-talking-swimming together, and working over each other's thinking and drawing we opened up spaces to see ideas differently and experience ourselves and each other in new ways.
Sympoietically we experienced what Ulmer calls writing practice that is 'fed by playful techniques such as not writing, following creative impulses, and writing with concepts... involving shaping ideas or remixing materials into something I can think with' (2018: 729). The figures below provide a representation of the collective emergence of our feeling-thinking-being through different mediums and modes.

Figure 3:
Emergence through multimodality (Verster, et al., 2019) Wood and van Nieuwenhuijze (2006) define sympoiesis in collaborative writing as an act of co-creation in which an insightful meaning emerges spontaneously or unexpectedly from the collaborative process. According to Csikszentmihályi (1990), true sympoiesis may be characterised by a 'eureka' moment, or by what Wood, et al. call a sense of 'flow that seems to eclipse other, more mundane experiences ' (2006: 94). This became a generative space where ideas wove into each other and new insights arose. Our work emerged out of the processes of inter-relationality with ourselves and our evolving environments. Our notion of collaboration increasingly included our recognition of the context both living and non-living in shaping and affecting our thinking-being-writing. We reflect on these shifts below: To tell a story of emergence in a two-dimensional text is not capturing the story, a multimodal form will capture it. Multimodality is a way that you can bring in post-humanist principles. It is no longer science or art, more art through science and here you find the new. (Reflective notes, 2019) Through collaborative writing, we were able to pay attention to our needs to nurture and support ourselves and each other, without feeling as if we were neglecting our families. Current practices in our HEI's encourage staff to write by facilitating attendance to writing retreats and writing over weekends and evenings. Bozalek argues that a writing retreat within the context of the neoliberal HEI has 'become part of the endeavour to get academics to churn out as many publications in as little time as possible ' (2017: 41). In addition, due to the undue pressure that writing retreats place on new academics, we would argue that the format does not suit all academics and particularly those academics with child-caring responsibilities. The prescriptive emphasis on outputs was a recipe for greater anxiety and exhaustion for us. These retreats took us away from the contact time with our families and required us to take what should be leisure time over weekends or vacations to work instead of recharging our energy. Furthermore, they placed extra pressures and costs on us to source alternative carers for our children. Tronto argues that 'the best forms of institutional care will be those which are highly deliberate and explicit about how to best meet the needs of the people who they serve. This requirement, in turn, requires that such institutions must build in adequate and well-conceived spaces within which to resolve such conflicts' (2010: 169).
By working more systematically and consistently in work time, and through online connections after hours, we were able to pay better attention to our own needs as people and professionals and the needs of our families. According to Tronto's (2010) definition of institutional care, we would argue that our practice of collaboratively retreating to writing during the working day provided an adequate and well-conceived space within which to write about what mattered to us, in a way in which it mattered to us, as well as under circumstances that served us.
The purposiveness of our care within our group was focused on both rekindling joy and meaning in our work, as well as supporting each other to publish in a way which nurtured our flourishing.

Leading and following
As colleagues and friends, we drew on each other's strengths and took on different leadership roles at different times. In our reflection note the following: We each take a leading role and so we are like birds flying in formation (borrowing from Black, et al.'s (2017a) idea of the V-formation). We work together to take the lead. We As a writing community, although we held the time and space for a weekly meeting, we found ourselves falling victims to the time pressures and performativity of our neoliberal context. The lack of attention to deep reading and the time needed for writing began to affect our own levels of writing and motivation. We began to focus more on rushing to meet submission deadlines and less on the quality of our thinking, reading and engagement. Our care and attentiveness to caring collaboration (Neimanis, 2012) were lost in the turbulence. These internal dynamics coupled with the constant pull of deadlines and time pressures further drained our sense of joy and energy to write. We gradually lost our joy and meaning. Increasingly we felt the need to justify time spent together in relation to articles published.  (Black, et al. 2017a: 141).
We started compartmentalising things and moving back to do individual work and it means that we are not engaging with one another and reading together. As soon as this started, we could feel that things were slipping and we were pressuring ourselves and starting to resist this way of doing. We could experience the disconnect and discomfort. (Reflective notes, 2019) These insights and our own feelings of collective and individual mourning forced us to begin to pay attention to the need to hold the space for Slow scholarship.

Keeping the focus on the process of reading-writing-becoming
Rather than getting caught up in a frenzied focus on producing academic articles, we made a shift in our values and practices toward attentive reading, writing, and becoming through each other. This reading-writing-becoming brought back the joy to our work. Gergen avers that 'writing is fundamentally an action within a relationship; it is within relationships that writing gains its meaning and significance ' (2008: 1). Creating the conditions for this sympoietic relationship to thrive are reflected below: The focus for us is on thriving and not the publication... and to be able to read about what other scholars in HEIs are doing. We create the agenda and we close ourselves into a cocoon. We redefine our own agenda. This is a powerful free space. There are not a lot of spaces to be and to think. We are in charge here and nobody is going to bully us. (Reflective notes, 2019) We realised that it was critical to take the time to pay attention to nurturing our relationships and to deepening attentive processes as co-reader-writer-creators. In our engagement, we became more mindful about our feedback and engagement with each other online and face-to-face spaces. Drawing on Tronto's (2013) care ethic our feedback sought to open up the spaces for creativity, curiosity and caring critique. Our use of technology enabled increased opportunities for feedback, and feedback to be given at a pace and time where responses could be attentively considered (Collett, et al., 2018).

Mindfulness and attentiveness to the personal and professional
We realised that we needed to stop and take time to notice what was happening in ourselves and with each other. Time and space needed to be created to unpack the loss we were experiencing. We had to be reminded not to feel guilty as Muntz, et al. (2015) affirm that caring for ourselves and others is work, which is not indulgent. As we commented: We We would begin our weekly reading-writing-becoming sessions with a personal check-in over a cup of coffee. These check-ins resulted in some serious and comical moments. We never tried to shy away from the realities of our personal lives and invited them in. The quote below captures and share these experiences: a child that has not gone to school today because he is sick, ...a son that is amputating a foot as medical student, ...two sons that had got dressed for school but their mother forgot it was civvies day so had to get undressed and redressed. (Reflective notes, 2019) When reading the article by Black and her colleagues (2017a) the quote below resonated with us. It mirrored and affirmed our experience of engaging holistically with our needs and finding spaces to engage differently in academia. They, like us: recognise the joy and pleasure of responding to our longings to connect, to 'care for self and others', and to 'be' differently in academia. Our resistance and pleasure have been found in opportunities to listen and to converse in meaningful ways that give time to reflection and relationship; ways that enable us to work cooperatively and speak our lives into the academy. (Black, et al., 2017a: 136) Making space to engage at a personal and collective level helped us to relate and connect in multiple ways. This became a platform where our ideas and emotions could take flight. These processes helped to build our caring and trust in each other and gave us space and permission to be both bold and vulnerable in the co-reading-writing-becoming process.

Actively practising Slow scholarship
Our experience of losing Slow and joy in our reading, writing and connecting affirmed the need to 'actively stand back and open up our senses and reconnect with our sense of space and time and mattering' (Reflective notes, 2019). We needed to strongly hold on to the values that underpin Slow in the process of developing our scholarship.
Slow reading helped to enhance attentiveness to our thinking and the thinking of others.
We noted that '[o]ne exercise that helped us reconnect was to read together and aloud to each other. To Slow down, to feel, to hear and just be with no expectation for that session' (Reflective notes, 2019). Bozalek argues for Slow scholarship to enable publishing in higher education, a practice which encourages 'hesitation, thoughtfulness and new ways of relating, for readers and writers... ' (2017: 41). She relates these practices to broader historical and political movements of Slowness or Slow scholarship (Bozalek, 2017;Mountz, et al., 2015;Ulmer, 2017).
Providing each other with sensitive and mindful feedback on our writing helped us to explore ideas in more depth and test out different ways of expressing ourselves and exploring what Slow scholarship meant. Drawing on the work of Barad (2007)  Below we elaborate on the Slow scholarly processes where we engaged in the use of multiple modalities and technology to deepen our engagement and sustain the writing process.
Creative meaning-making through multi-modalities and spaces Bozalek (2017), drawing on the work of Haraway (2016) describes Slow attentive engagement as 'the ability to "render each other capable" (Haraway 2016: 1) through "becoming-with" our readings, writings and feedback to each other' (Bozalek, 2017: 42). By exploring our practice through multi-modalities, and in different spaces, we rekindled the joy and laughter in our work.
We experienced our own writing and confidence growing through this process of intra-action and unfoldment. Our Slow collaborative readingwritingbecoming was rendered through multimodal engagement in sculpting, writing poetry, drawing, concept development, walking, swimming, using free and creative writing and incorporating different formats and applications of technology. These reflections capture our Slow reading-writing-becoming through what Bozalek describes as in-depth 'processes of writing as they unfold' (2017: 45): We could go back to other readings and re-read it within the context. We could read Slowly  (Black, et al., 2017a: 151).
Becoming scholars with and through each other and through different modes and spaces was key to our experience of Slow scholarship. We truly felt ourselves as companion species that lived and thrived off each other and our environments. This quote by Haraway aptly describes our processes of engaging in Slow sympoetic scholarship: 'Getting hungry, eating, and partially digesting, partially assimilating, and partially transforming: these are the actions of companion species' (Haraway, 2016: 65).
Getting ahead together by standing in solidarity and working collaboratively afforded us the opportunity to rekindle the joy and pleasure of readingwritingbecoming.

Finding joy and pleasure through our scholarship
Ensuring the well-spring for joy and pleasure in our academic lives required us to hold the personal and professional spaces for our flourishing. This we felt could only be achieved through sustaining spaces for deepened collegial engagement and Slow scholarship. It required us to stand firm and make the time and space for ourselves to engage differently. We noted that it was '[a] conscious fight the whole time that we need to push from the inside and not give in' (Reflective notes, 2019).
Joy came through purposeful and attentive processes of reading, writing and letting new insights about our professional practice unfold. It required re-embracing and deepening practices of Slow scholarship. We felt 'it was essential for us to be in the moment and feel that we are doing something that adds value and that matters' (Reflective notes, 2019).
Readingwritingbecoming together gave us joy and a sense of accomplishment. Kern, et al. identify joy in their academic practice as a radical practice, they argue that 'joy does things, it can be transformative ' (2014: 834).
This sense of accomplishment as Slow scholars came through our deepening or relationality to ourselves, each other, our work, and our institutions. By engaging in acts of Slow sympoietic scholarship we were opening up spaces within our higher education institutions to enhance our collective flourishing and the flourishing of others. Our experience is echoed in these words by Bozalek (2017) who argues for a Slow scholarship, one which 'moves away from instrumentalizing writing, to seeing it as an ethical practice of affecting and being affected, of becoming-with each other as readerlywriters and writerlyreaders' (Bozalek, 2017: 54). From within 'the belly of the beast,' we had begun to challenge the corporatisation of the academy.

Re-Turning: Moving backward, forward and sideways
In this paper, we have charted our journey as three female academics engaging in practices of collaborative academic writing informed by Tronto's (2013) Political Ethic of Care, Slow scholarship (Bozalek, 2017), and Sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016). We explored some of the possibilities and pitfalls of writing collaboratively within the neoliberal HEI context. We highlight key processes which could enable a Slow sympoietic scholarship of 'becoming with and through each other'. This requires us to reclaim and recreate the time and contexts within which we can pay attention to deepening our relationality with ourselves, each other and our worlding. Our experience may be of value to other academics working towards flourishing and Slow scholarship in higher education. Belinda Verster is a senior lecturer in urban and regional planning at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. She completed her Doctoral studies in 2020 and holds a Master's degree in urban and regional planning. She has twenty-five years' academic experience and has published in the fields of sustainable urban transportation, professional academic development and higher education. She is a registered professional urban planner with the South African

Author Biographies
Council of Planners and an executive member of the South African Planning Institute.