Care as Resistance within Educational Practice

This chapter shares the learning of the authors who collaborated on an Arts and Culture University of Exeter Creative Fellowship in 2021–2022. The Creative Fellowship was itself a rupture, a process-driven placement with an open-ended approach, where artists and university staff were peers, and no fixed outcome was required. We held a common interest in care as resistance in contemporary workplaces, and as crucial to both learning and generating new ways of working through creative processes. This chapter is formed from edited extracts from two recorded conversations between the authors that took place towards the end of the Creative Fellowship. We reflected on the key moments, tensions, and insights. We present these as the learning we gained, which could usefully support others who seek to centre care, resist from within, or otherwise develop care-ful, ethical educational futures. We argue that vulnerability and discomfort are fundamental to creative processes, including learning, and care is required to hold these experiences productively. We conclude that the overemphasis in HE on individualised approaches to care—where staff and students are offered support such as apps to address experiences of stress, or where the burden of caring falls on individuals—fails to acknowledge its vital social and interpersonal dimensions and the responsibility of the institution towards sustainable ways of working for the community.