Critical Management Studies (CMS)

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Invitation to a PDW on Restorative Spaces and Faculty Wellbeing

  • 1.  Invitation to a PDW on Restorative Spaces and Faculty Wellbeing

    Posted 07-22-2021 05:53

    On behalf of the organisers, and in the midst of a bruising time for academics, I'm glad to bring to your attention a PDW at the forthcoming Annual Meeting.

    Building Community around Self-care: Restorative Spaces and Faculty Wellbeing
    PDW 1095 – Tuesday 03 August (check Annual Meeting Program for your time zone)

    In 2019 Smith and Ulus asked 'who cares for academics?' The rather brutal answer is that in the neoliberal university, we have been left largely to look after ourselves, even while the nature of academic work in recent decades has resulted in a sharp increase in mental health issues and a general decline in well-being among faculty. Well-being provisions from universities have been superficial, placing the onus squarely on already over-burdened academics to manage their own well-being. Collective action is vital in expressing our need for rising above institutional tokenism around well-being and to open up new pathways for academics to maximize their wellbeing together.  We believe there is a great potential here not only to leverage more institutionally-sanctioned restorative space, but to use such spaces as a vehicle to challenge the managerialist processes that allow a wellbeing vacuum to arise in the first place.

    In this PDW, we propose providing a safe zone for an inclusive community of scholars from across the Academy to discuss restorative space as both a coping mechanism and a lever for more systemic change. Following Action Research principles of: Refection, Planning, Action, we open the session by sharing our individual restorative space narratives, and invite participants to share their own stories of restoration and the impact that restoration has on their professional and personal lives. We then explore how collaborative restorative spaces could be created and accepted within our workplaces and draw up actions for making this happen.

    The aim of the workshop is to come to a refreshed, professional perspective with renewed energy and clarity through developing sense-making around the concept of restorative spaces to facilitate discussion with other colleagues, unions and employers as to how our wellbeing might be better supported.

    Spaces still available – search the AOM Annual Meeting Program for PDW 1095 – please come and join us! Feel free to join us within your own restorative space and bring along any artefacts to share that relate to what you consider as restorative to your own wellbeing.

    Sarah Robinson, Linda Sama, David Jones, Nicholas Rhew, Victor Friedman and Mark Egan
    PDW Organisers



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    Richard Longman
    University of the West of England
    Bristol
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