The Answer Lies in Our Humanity: Research and Methodologies That Facilitate Healing and Hope

What could have become an ugly slugfest of recrimination and blame, fuelling hatred as the attacker hoped, became instead a moment when a nation came together, honoured its differences, accepted its failings and united behind a future vision of a land where bigotry and racism are not welcome. “The answer lies in our humanity,” Ardern said. “We each hold the power—in our words, in our actions, in our daily acts of kindness. Let that be the legacy of the 15th of March.” Hage (2019) suggests that this approach demonstrated a different way of leading and being, a “special kind of love”, that crosses boundaries and has the power to heal and restore. This discourse is a nuanced departure from the so-called “female leadership advantage” (Eagly and Carli 2003; Post 2015), potentially signaling a moment of possibility (Butler 2004). Indeed, there have been calls to bring hope into our research. Kivinen (2021) discusses hope as the act of “voic[ing] that which has remained silent” (p. 497). Therefore, this special issue is aimed at seizing this potential moment of hopeful possibility to collectively encourage new ways of understanding and knowing. Informed by the desire for such a reorientation away from a politics of fear and division often aligned with heteronormative masculinity and the “normalization of exclusion” (Wodak 2015, 205). The papers presented in this special issue look beyond the political sphere providing a space for researchers concerned with issues of equity, inclusion and social justice to voice and share their insights of healing and hope. The focus on kindness and compassion (A. V. Simpson et al. 2022; Van Wart, Macaulay, and Haberstroh 2022), while seemingly challenging traditional gendered norms, has opened a novel space for scholars to resist, to research and to write differently (Pullen et al. 2020). To begin, three of the articles in this special issue embrace this challenge. Maranda Ridgway, Michaela Edwards and Louise Oldridge provide a rich and compellingly crafted article presenting a methodological approach offering a diverse way of feminist writing. Through multi-vocal memory work, the authors share their experiences of writing collaboratively against the backdrop of the broken neoliberal academy where they identify their “academic selves” as being cracked. The authors cite the negative implications of the “individualized and managerialized” academy, where career success is measured by the amount of quality outputs and in achieving grants. Drawing on Doaism as an analytical lens and the Japanese art of Kintsugi as a mode of self-care, they find beauty in what is broken. They highlight, paradoxically, that pride, positivity, and healing can be achieved despite the demands of the broken academy. Authors Michelle O'Shea, Victoria Paraschak, Sonya Pearce, Hazel Maxwell and Alison Pullen consider the relationship between hope and academic activism in response to Rebecca Solnit's (2016) call for “hope in the dark”. The five indigenous and nonindigenous authors collaborated to explore new ways to privilege indigenous knowledge in answer to the increasing inequalities unfolding under the neoliberal ideology of Western nations. Drawing on “tempered radicals” theory (Meyerson and Scully 1995), the authors carefully nurtured their collective sense of mutual understanding, trust, and belonging. Polyphonic writing was drawn on to facilitate open and sometimes “unsettling” discussions of power and privilege resulting in the peeling away of “outsider” and “insider positionality”. Working from a strength-based perspective that embraces “actionable hope” and commitment to a “shared preferred future” the authors set about to create a pathway of profound possibilities and transformative change. The contribution from Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya, Aylin Kunter, Kayleigh Woods Harley, Isobel Edwards, Sarah Molyneaux, Holly Nicholas, Isabelle Habib and Janet Sheath explores the interesting subject of “office housework”. In sharing their experiences as a group of eight university women (both academic and professional staff) they advocate for a revaluation of office housework as critical indispensable labor that supports the functioning of educational institutions; hence, it needs to be recognised and revalued. The authors use collective writing as a form of feminist resistance against the gendered invisibility they experience, particularly in the performance of “office housework” and how neoliberal and patriarchal structures within universities perpetuate these inequalities. They challenge the idea that individual resistance (such as saying ‘no’) is sufficient, arguing that true progress requires collective efforts to redistribute such work fairly across all staff members. The methodology used emphasizes connection, healing, and feminist knowledge production through shared consciousness-raising practices. The past 30 years has seen significant development of differing feminist, indigenous and other perspectives, opening up new challenges and insights within the broader “narrative” research field. Using participants' own words has been particularly significant, providing the opportunity for a variety of methodological approaches such as autobiography, autoethnography, biography, case history/study, ethnography, life story and oral history to record, interpret, re-story and present stories. These stories go beyond the traditional “tidy” and sanitized accounts encouraged in more traditional academic studies, oftentimes encompassing the personal, embodied and reflexive (Boncori and Smith 2019). Narrative, more specifically the collective narrative, is a powerful method to disrupt a dominant discourse and expose embedded institutional practices as shown by the next two articles. Authors Eunice Gaerlan and Yael Cameron consider what it means to be an intelligent young brown woman in a world where the colonial positioning of successful girlhood is embodied in White centeredness. Plainly put, the authors challenge the “oppressive narrative that brown girls aren't bright,” and look to collective storytelling to contest such narratives. Drawing out people's ideas in their own words via storytelling is particularly significant when studying the stories of women and girls, ensuring that their experiences are no longer invisible (R. Simpson and Lewis 2007). Thus, the creative storying and re-storying approaches of narrative researchers Laurel Richardson and Patricia Leavy are particularly relevant in this research. The co-construction of collective counter narratives that dispute entrenched notions of entitlement are core to this research study and offer hope that the dominant discourse of brown girls is one of affirmation; that brown girls are bright, they are articulate and they are successful. The next article by Abigail Winter, Janice Rieger, Nicole Vickery, Shannon Satherley, Jenna Gillet-Swan, Faith Valencia-Forrester, Francis Bobongie-Harris, Katherine Kirkwood, Marianella Chamorro-Koc, Sarah Johnstone and Kathryn Pinel further illustrates the power of the collective voice in making sense of individual experiences within similar institutional settings. In this article, a group of 11 women academics used a multi-vocal process to narrate and analyze their personal stories of working in higher education in Australia. In an iterative and reflexive process involving written memories and poems, the authors wove together their understandings of their and others' experiences and positionality in academia. The authors explain that by “including our perspectives, we make this research “multivocal” (Tracy 2010, 844) but avoid dwelling on our stories of marginalization, so as not to “‘further negatively portray’ (Tracy 2010, 847) ourselves and those like us”. Although their stories reveal instances of precarity, decreasing funding, and an institutional focus on individual rather than collective achievements, the shared experience of writing brought the women hope and a renewed commitment to remain curious and creative while advocating for a utopian future for higher education. More recently researchers are looking to embrace methodological creativity as apparent in multimodality, “arts-informed inquiry”, art, song-writing and the presentation of these in a performative context (Kress 2010; Leggo 2008; Kendall and Murray 2004; Douglas 2012, Collier and Perry 2021; Suskind 2023). Poetics and metaphors (Myers 2016) have also provided an evocative way for authors to engage with the complexities of gendered contexts, organizations and stories; for example, the “maze” of navigating intersectional identities (Gottardello 2023), and Muhr's (2011) conceptualizing of gendered leadership through the frame of cyborgs. Post-humanist approaches (Davies and Riach 2019; Finkel and Danby 2019; Taylor and Fraser 2019) have shown us the learning we might take from the natural world to help us see beyond the human view of gendered relations. The two articles outlined below draw on arts-informed and post-humanist approaches to contest and give visibility to traditional structures of oppression and explore new imaginings and ways of being. Riya Bisht and Kathleen Riach's study illustrates how following a feminist inspired “public feelings project” approach brought moments of happiness for women experiencing depression at work in Lima, Peru. Depression has particular stigma for women in South American societies, and the authors adopted the term “Loca” to encompass the penalties for women stigmatized as “crazy” and/or unstable. In this article, depression is positioned as the consequence of contemporary Peru's post-colonial structures of gendered, cultural and economic oppression, which intensify the emotional and financial toll for women with depression. The authors decided to follow the “public feelings approach”, after their use of conventional interpretive methods failed to reflect the lived experiences of working women grappling with poor mental health. Their “art as hope” methodology found that collaborative portraiture overcame the binary depictions of depression as “bad” and fixed, revealing the “joy in between” moments for participants. This article by Lydia A. Martin, Janet G. Sayers and Brigid Carroll presents Rosi Braidotti's (see Braidotti 2006, 2011) notion of transpositions as an exciting and innovative methodological framework for undertaking feminist inquiry in organizational studies. Utilizing Braidotti's six practices for engaging in feminist post-humanist thinking, the authors discuss two texts, Ursula K. LeGuin's SUR and Nicola Griffith's Ammonite. These texts of feminist speculative fiction are presented to illustrate how we can transition our thinking to be outside of the “anthropocentric and humanistic perspectives… embedded in our collective social psyche.” The authors advise that transpositions provide the ability to “contest traditional, gendered or heteronormative traditions…” “reworking previously exclusionary images, narratives and ideas that inform contemporary organizational processes…” toward new possibilities of inquiry. Their method discussed within the context of radical empiricism and feminist action research, counters these accepted meanings providing “alternative imaginaries opening up opportunities where both healing and hope is possible”. This special issue, in addition, highlights that our efforts toward the infinite game may go beyond the methodologies we use. The act of presenting our research differently has also been highlighted as a form of praxis. Indeed, for Kiriakos and Tienari (2018), conceptualizing, researching, and “writing as love” formed a direct challenge to the masculinity of the finite game; for Sayers and Jones (2015) it was poetry that troubled “the regimes of power” (p. 94). Indeed, the notion of a relational ethic or ethic of care is one which is familiar to many feminist researchers (e.g., Eagly, Gartzia, and Carli 2015; Harre, Grant, Locke & Sturm 2017) and is reflected in the next two articles where the researchers carry out community activism with kindness and compassion. In this article, Helngiwe Ndlovu describes how, when researching gendered violence and trauma within her own underprivileged community, she needed to “relearn” what it meant to research within this context, putting aside some of the westernized and privileged notions of ethics, relationality in research and research design. Through this courageous reflection, she reminds us of the importance to ensure that our participants are “not exposed to further violence and trauma… further dismembering of their bodies and experiences”. We are encouraged to consider fragmented narratives as an approach to foster healing. This article also considers the acute responsibilities of researchers as “academic activists” not to re-traumatize the communities they work alongside. The authors of this research (Alice Brown, Emma Vieira, Jackie Oakley, Dorothy Bagshaw, Patrick Egan, Louise Southalan, Lindey Andrews, Jocelyn Jones, Daniel Morrison and Mandy Wilson), cognizant of the “spiritual homelessness” of the Aboriginal people as a result of colonization, highlight the importance of choosing a methodology that embraces the “right spirit”, that is, a healing spirit that centers the voice of the participants at the heart of the research. During the ongoing process of negotiation and collaboration throughout the project, the authors highlight the significance and value of implementing the six values framework, that is, spirit and integrity, cultural continuity, equity, reciprocity, respect, and responsibility (NHMRC 2018). Reflexivity is core to their participatory action research process and the researchers identify a number of micro-ethical learnings and practices that further enhanced the relational and collaborative nature of this research, ensuring a research practice that is one that is truly community led. We hope this special issue will encourage discussion, debate, and future research that foregrounds the hopeful possibilities of feminist and innovative methodological approaches. Many of the papers in this issue address the paradoxical tensions implicit in our call for greater compassion in research. These methodologies that invoke “kindness and strength, support and assertiveness, inclusivity and equity” (Simpson et al., 2022, 339) chart a way forward for researchers to open up spaces that speak to “our potential as people living together to be open and inclusive, and to promote the life and growth that helps us flourish as individuals and communities” (Harre et al. 2017, 5). Such approaches to research are not without challenges for those involved. Contesting the established and institutionalized understandings of research is both troubling and courageous work (Harcourt et al. 2022). Challenging fixed notions that embed traditional hierarchies and career paths under the guise of meritocracy is not without cost (Harris Ravenswood, and Myers 2013). This work also requires much from the researchers personally, in a way that more distanced versions of the academic pursuit do not (Kivinen 2021). As feminist researchers focused on inequalities, privilege and oppression in organizations and society, we share the belief that research can “change the contours of inequality” (Calas, Smircich, and Holvino 2014, 44; Benschop 2021). We are privileged to have the authors in this issue join us in this pursuit and acknowledge the sensitivity and care they bring to this space (Puig de la Bella Casa 2017). Praxis requires this to be our legacy, in fighting bigotry, inequalities and racism, and facilitating research spaces for healing, hope and humanity (Benschop 2021). The special issue editorial team would like to thank all those who submitted, reviewers and the GWO editorial team for their support seeing this special issue to fruition. The author has nothing to report.