Fostering Socially Just Care in Digital Communities: The Case of Two Alternative Academic Spaces

Abstract: The orientation of collective care is barely present within the current academic system, which perpetuates the idea of individualistic care, dismissing common vulnerabilities and psychological disorders. Injecting feminist ethics of care into academia is a means to resist the individualistic logic of neoliberal pressures and repoliticize academic life. In this sense, care-full scholarship is about taking care of both the academics and the research publics, organizing alternative spaces to develop new modes of research and intentional communities. What is currently under debate, following a long multidisciplinary academic tradition on the concept of care, is the turn from an individual and sanitary approach towards social and collective dimensions of care, nurturing a community’s well-being. Following Bali and Zamora’s idea of socially just care through parity of participation, where the care responsibility and the power to design their experiences are distributed among all members of a community, as well as literature on online forms of care through digital tools, we analyse two 2-years-long experiential and creative academic practices co-created by two early career researchers and their growing online communities – DiverGent and Innovative Academia . Through an auto/ethnographic methodology, we investigate two main research questions: to what extent do these experiences develop a socially just care? How does the digital dimension favour or hinder its formation? We argue that both projects create alternative spaces disseminating scholarship to a wider group of stakeholders, through unconventional, more accessible, and slower dynamics, contributing to collective care by sharing practices that can be reproduced elsewhere.