Sanctuary/ing: a tender knowledge practice in toxic times

How do we – scholars in the academy – hold ourselves, each other and the practices of intellectual work in times of entangled multispecies, geopolitical and educational crises? This article presents and reflects on a two-year writing experiment that involved a regular, virtual, group-writing practice among four academics situated in the global North. The writing and resulting discussions evolved into a shared archive and a recursive archiving practice where material was re-encountered and revisited. The whole enterprise, including the writing and editing of this article, became an approach of collective thinking and analysis informed by traditions of psychosocial group analysis of data, memory work and auto-ethnography. In this article we present an account of our work together, characterising it as a knowledge practice, constituted through a combination of writing, reading aloud, listening, responding, archiving, revisiting and writing again. The article is illustrated with examples of our process and our multi-vocal writing. The article invites the reader into live archiving practices, academic companionship and intellectual work. At the centre of the article is the claim that our work can be understood as a sanctuary/ing practice , that enabled us to bear and continue to bear the deep worries for higher education and the frictions and demands of research and teaching in unsettling times. Writing for and with each other, building an archive from these common goods and working iteratively with that archive is offered as a tender knowledge practice for such toxic times.