‘See us’: an urgent call to collaborate with colleagues in crisis environments around the world

ABSTRACT

This essay is written as an urgent call for collaboration. It is a provocation for academics in non-crisis environments to proactively reach out to our academic colleagues in Ukraine and other severely disrupted crisis environments around the world to work together to create and extend knowledge and understanding about interpersonal and organizational phenomena during extreme circumstances. We – those of us who are higher education practitioners living within non-crisis environments – have colleagues around the world who are navigating through fractured and uncertain contexts. They are calling out to be seen, to be heard, to be engaged and partnered with in generative and holistic ways. In this essay, we begin a conversation about potential topics for collaborative exploration in our learning and teaching spaces with the hope that they will inspire action and connection between academics living within relative peace and privilege and those living within severe disruption and crisis.

Запропонований есей написаний як термінове прохання про співпрацю. Це заклик до науковців у некризових середовищах активно взаємодіяти і співпрацювати із колегами з академічного середовища в Україні та в інших країнах по всьому світу, які переживають серйозні виклики. Разом ми можемо працювати над створенням і розширенням знань про міжособистісні й організаційні явища під час екстремальних обставин. Ті з нас, хто є практиками вищої освіти, хто живе у некризовому середовищі, мають колег у всьому світі, які перебувають у нестабільному та невизначеному контексті. А вони прагнуть бути поміченими, почутими, залученими і співпрацювати у цілісний спосіб. У цьому есеї ми починаємо розмову про потенційні теми для спільних досліджень у наших навчальних і викладацьких просторах із надією, що вони надихнуть на дії та зв'язок між науковцями, які живуть у відносному мирі та нормальності, і тими, хто перебуває в умовах серйозних викликів і криз.

KEYWORDS:

• Ukraine
• crisis
• disruption
• higher education
• ethic of care

There can be no doubt that we are living in a time of crisis and disruption (Rammbuda 2024). For many, we experienced our first major crisis living through the pandemic, an event leaving the world with permanent invisible scars (Glover, Myers, and Collins 2024; Wood et al. 2024). Although many of us are through the worst of that global crisis and are now living and working in environments of relative peace, we have colleagues for whom the pandemic was just one in a series of violent, exploitative, and devastating disruptions resulting in severe and irreparable fractures to their lives. For these exhausted, brave, and resilient academics, each new day brings with it an acute focus on survival.

It is these colleagues who are crying out for partnership and engagement as they fight for their lives and freedoms within extreme contexts including those that are rife with poverty, hunger, political instability, corruption, financial and economic volatility, human rights violations, hate crimes, natural disasters, and war (Sharma et al. 2023). To hear their voices and understand their lived experience through unimaginable disruption and fracturing, we must embrace intentionality, inclusivity, criticality, and relationality as we extend ourselves to engage in transnational, socio-political, and onto-epistemological questioning and exploration in our higher education teaching and research (Akkad and Henderson 2024; Calás and Smircich 2023; Meriläinen, Tienari, and Greedharry 2023).

This essay, written as a collaborative point of departure, was crafted by a ‘we’ consisting of eight academics – seven Ukrainians and one Australian. Here, we share the power and potential of the type of collaboration we are calling for – one that transitioned seven ‘I’s into a ‘we’ through the sharing of our lived experiences, resulting in the nurturing of friendship as well as co-authorship (Dyer et al. 2024). Our story began when one of our Ukrainian authors reached out to the Australian author in August of 2022, six months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The request was to help the Ukrainian author synthesize and disseminate her story – her lived experience – about how she and her colleagues, many of whom are co-authors on this essay, were forced to significantly change their teaching practices within the context of a devastating and genocidal war. Now, almost two years later, we stand together, writing this call to passionately implore others who are living within non-crisis environments to ‘see’ others, like the Ukrainian authors here, who are living through violence, devastation, conflict, and isolation. Stories, like ours, need to be told. They are stories of a struggle to survive, with academic freedoms and institutional infrastructures that are, at best, compromised and, at worst, eradicated. We need others to listen to our voices, share our stories, and take action in whatever ways they can.

In this essay, we are focused on the need for international higher education partnership and engagement in the context of those, like us, who are living through war (Kayyali 2024). Although war and armed conflict is only one type of crisis, it is estimated that there are over 110 taking place within the world right now including more than 45 in the Middle East and North Africa (Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, and Western Sahara), more than 35 in Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan.), 21 in Asia (Afghanistan, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, and The Philippines), seven in Europe (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan), and six in Latin America (Mexico and Colombia) (Geneva Academy 2024). We share this list in its entirety as an illustration of both the tragic ubiquity of war and the staggering presence of bias and prejudice on the part of those who are in positions of power (e.g. governments, media) to raise awareness and provide support. When those in power are the sole determinants of what stories are told, we only ‘see’ a fraction of the carnage – the displacement, devastation, and destruction – with so much of it overlooked, dismissed, and forgotten. And yet the people living within each of these conflicts include our academic colleagues and their children, families, friends, students, and community members.

For those of us who live in Ukraine, every aspect of our personal and professional lives is affected by the war (Greenfield 2024). One of us is married to a man who left his job to volunteer to fight for Ukraine when the war started, and six months into the war lost both of his legs in a land mine explosion. Now, in the evenings, they work together creating a support network for others who have been injured during war. Another of us has spent countless weeks over the past two years living in underground shelters with her spouse and young children, resolutely refusing to leave Ukraine as she fights to both stay alive and support her family, community, and country. And yet, each of us recognizes that we are the fortunate ones – we are still alive, collaboratively writing this essay, able to share our story.

Our story is that we – the seven Ukrainian co-authors on this essay – have continued to work throughout the war as faculty members of Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine, creating rigorous, engaging, and authentic learning experiences for our students. Each day of teaching involves planning our next classes factoring in how far it is to the nearest bomb shelter given the frequency of air raid alarms. We see ourselves as soldiers fighting on the front lines of war. Not the traditional front lines of combat, but the front lines of education – holding our communities together, reaching out to share the realities of war with the world, fighting to record and preserve our culture, and supporting our troops. We are shaping our educational spaces to provide connection, engagement, knowledge, and care, enabling students and community members to come together to support each other and Ukraine. We are doing these things in an environment of extraordinary uncertainty and disruptive change. And now, two years into a war with no end in sight, we are both physically and emotionally exhausted, feeling increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

The quotes we share here are ours, as we reflected upon a question posed to us by the first author, our colleague and friend who has never been to Ukraine, never lived through war, never met any of us in person, and currently lives in a peaceful suburb of The Gold Coast, Australia. The question she asked us was, ‘What can those of us who live in other parts of the world do to help you?’ Although our individual discussions with her were separate, each of us had the same initial response, ‘see us’ we said. It was a passionate and whole-hearted plea for educators who live and work outside of Ukraine to engage and partner with us to explore and understand phenomena together, as well as share the urgency and significance of our current reality and lived experiences. As one of us reflected:

Talking together like this is very important because we won’t win our war if other countries don’t support Ukraine … Now, after our time together, you and your students can tell the truth about Ukraine and about this war … This is a real war. This is not a special operation. This is genocide. This is a special case, for now and for future democracy globally. We not only fight for our territories, but we also fight for our children, for democracy, and for our culture.

Here, standing together with our colleague in Australia, we call to academics in non-crisis environments to ‘see’ us – not only the ‘us’ in Ukraine but academics who are living within crisis environments around the world. We make this call from a place of ‘care-full’ connectedness and critical friendship (Sotiropoulou and Cranston 2023), with the acknowledgement that there is very little known about the experiences and perspectives of academics, like us, who are living through crisis and conflict (Akkad and Henderson 2024; Kayyali 2024). Here, we encourage movement beyond the transactional space that many neoliberal academic institutions use to measure our work with tick boxes, accreditation protocol, and performative directives. We call for exploration which utilizes a radical, critical, and epistemically pluralistic foundation (Zanoni, Barros, Alcadipani 2023) with a humanist lens to consider the crises which constitute our global ‘grand challenges’ (Colombo 2023). These challenges are often organizationally represented by higher education institutions making commitments to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through responsible management practices, curricular change, and targeted scholarship (Milton 2021; Useh 2021). Walking the talk of supporting and extending these global initiatives falls precisely within the call for action we share with you here. There is also a moral argument to our call which is grounded within care ethics and our positions as homines curans (caring people) who have the capacity to challenge the often taken-for-granted neoliberalism within higher education institutions as we work together towards the enactment of a solidarity-based form of care (Tronto 2017; Wood et al. 2024).

It is in this spirit of academic solidarity and community that we shift our use of the term ‘we.’ From this point forward, ‘we’ no longer refers to our author group, but rather, to everyone who is a higher education practitioner because ‘we’ are all in this together as part of a larger academic whole. We can no longer claim to espouse knowledge and understanding about higher educational phenomena if we narrowly and myopically look towards those systems and environments that are predictable, convenient, and grounded in orthodoxy and colonialism (Peredo 2023) rather than those that reflect the chaotic, profound, and multifaceted complexities of crisis (Kayyali 2024). We need to extend ourselves and ‘see’ our colleagues in places and spaces of conflict, volatility, urgency, fracturing, and disruption. And we need to do that as partners – with respect, courage, compassion, curiosity, and tenacity at the core of our connection. In doing so, we will begin to address the ‘existential crisis’ felt within universities (Friedland and Jain 2022, 15) through action with ‘social contribution firmly placed at the center of their (our) missions’ (25). If we work together embracing genuine partnership as our foundation, there is no limit to how we can engage and what we can learn from one another, as is illustrated in one of our reflections:

Everyone can support us in different ways. The only question is how people want to be useful. We will take any help and support. I think even things like our ongoing conversations here. They are new experiences for both of us, something precious. I hope for you, as it is for me, our conversations aren’t just about creating an article, but, rather, they are about creating human connection.

This type of meaningful human connection is waiting for everyone reading this. For those of us in higher education who have the privilege of living in non-crisis environments, online platforms provide us with an unprecedented opportunity to generatively and holistically work with and learn from our colleagues who are navigating the pressures of teaching, research, and service through extreme and uncertain contexts (Magnani and Gioia 2023). We have a variety of powerful theoretical and practical lenses through which we can explore how extreme environmental disruption and extraordinary challenge impact higher education as well as methodological tools that are currently being refined and reworked for use in the context of crisis (Sharma et al. 2023). With these resources at our disposal, and colleagues who are calling out for partners with whom they can explore the complex realities of higher education learning and teaching phenomena within crisis together, there is every reason to take action.

We are looking for people to network with because … in academia, I think you need to have a strong international network, not only for academic reasons, but for cultural exchange, mutually creative projects, students who can work together, etc. Many of us at the (XX University), we lack those contacts from around the world.

Below, we share a starting point for potential areas in which academics can collaborate with colleagues whose current lived experiences are in crisis environments. We frame our ideas in terms of Ukraine and war because that is where seven of the eight authors of this essay live and work. Yet, as above, we acknowledge that there are many types of crises woven throughout the fabric of countless spaces and places of others’ lived experiences. As such, our message is neither restricted to Ukraine nor war, it encompasses a call for collaboration with academics living within any environment experienced as extreme in its fracturing, disruption, and isolation.

Exploring higher education in extreme conditions

Scholars who have written about the role of higher education in crisis environments highlight numerous ways in which adaptation is required including enhancing students’ agency in the learning process and prioritizing their well-being over traditional knowledge testing (Lavrysh et al. 2022), encouraging reflexive critical thinking and open-mindedness (Bar-Tal, Vered, and Fuxman 2020), and, in post-conflict settings, serving as a catalyst for reconstruction and recovery through social cohesion, dialogue, teaching and research (Rammbuda 2024). These represent only a few of the countless research topics that scholars could collaboratively explore with respect to curricular and pedagogical change tailored specifically to crisis-laden higher education environments. In an example of Ukrainian adaptation, numerous academics have turned to service-learning as both a curricular pillar for university-community partnerships and a course-specific pedagogical tool to help educators structure collaboration, connectedness, and meaning for themselves and their students as they struggle through ‘the existential crisis that is their daily lives’ (Greenfield 2024). And although service learning has been used as a pedagogical tool within most disciplines for decades, there is little known about its application in crisis environments (Kenworthy and Opatska 2023). There is much we have yet to learn.

We recognize that there are a lot of differences between the teaching and research we're providing here in a time of war and the teaching and research others are providing at different universities around the world in non-crisis environments. We would like to communicate and collaborate with each other. And the collaboration should be not just to see what you think we are going through from your own experience, but also to explore it through our eyes, to see what we see and understand what we are living through from our perspective.

In another example, there are countless opportunities to partner with academics across Ukraine and the members of our local community groups, organizations, and businesses to engage in case writing. Recent cases written from the voices of those living through crisis, shaped by the content we teach in our courses, would be a powerful way to provide students living in non-crisis environments with opportunities to engage in reflective discussion, encourage higher-order thinking, and stimulate creative problem solving. Cases could also provide students and academics with opportunities to forge connections across borders, expand their understanding, and give students living within non-crisis environments an opportunity to consider what it would be like to see the world through the lens of others who are living through crisis. There is a high level of motivation to engage in this type of educationally-oriented case writing and storytelling, as can be seen in this reflection:

There were many countries that never thought about Ukraine and now people from those countries are getting in touch with us, they want to learn about us. It's very important to share our stories so people learn about us. There are those who know nothing about Ukraine, and through our stories they will understand that we are not just struggling on the front line, but we are also actively studying, teaching, supporting, and rebuilding our communities, and providing business with very deep and complex thinking.

Identity and culture

For educators who are interested in topics including anthropology, ethnography, sociology, culture, and research in identity, Ukrainians are in desperate need of assistance recording their history. As people who are having parts of their culture erased through the intentional targeting and destruction of cultural artefacts and historical monuments (Farago et al. 2022), recording personal, institutional, and cultural knowledge through case writing, interviews, media outreach, and other forms of sharing their stories has become critical to their survival.

To fully comprehend the importance of capturing their history and sharing the stories of Ukrainians living through war, Xanthaki, Shaheed, and Ghanea (2023) warned

Cultural resources – such as repositories of Ukrainian literature, museums, and historical archives – are being destroyed, and there is a widespread narrative of demonisation and denigration of Ukrainian culture and identity promoted by Russian officials, along with calls for ideological repression and strict censorship in the political, cultural and educational spheres. Let us be clear: the Ukrainian people have a right to their identity.

As one of our Ukrainian co-authors shares: ‘This erasure of history is not only our problem, but the common problem of culture for humanity.’

Well-being and care

Making sense of the extraordinary organizational demands and emotional complexities that run rife during times of crisis (Dwyer, Hardy, and Tsoukas 2021) and the impact of those processes on individuals’ well-being (Li and Michel 2023) and performance (Kalkman 2023) are critical areas of exploration. For scholars who are interested in exploring issues related to positive psychology including an ethics of care, compassion, emotion, well-being, mental illness, meaning, coping, gratitude, stress, connection, and isolation (Waters et al. 2022), Ukrainians have lived through two back-to-back crises, moving directly from the pandemic into a time of war. There are lessons learned from the pandemic that helped Ukrainians to immediately navigate the challenges of war (e.g. leveraging the benefits of virtual work and online communication) (Obłój and Voronovska 2024), yet the emotional toll this has taken is palpable (Richardson 2024). As one of our Ukrainian co-authors shares:

Isolation is a very, very big part of our lives right now. We feel disconnected and alone. And that's why it’s so important for us to be in touch with the rest of the world in as many ways as we can.

There is much to unpack and explore together. For example, what can we learn from our colleagues who are navigating multiple ongoing crises? How can we draw upon an embodied and relational approach to solidarity during crisis using a psychosocial lens (Fotaki 2022) to engage with those of us who are living through wars with no end in sight? How do crisis-exacerbated issues of isolation and fear impact identity and agency (Lund Dean 2023)? From a learning and teaching perspective, how is the development of collegiality and care for academics related to the ‘isolation, digital fatigue, anxiety and the ongoing emotional toll brought on by constant change’ during times of crisis (Wood et al. 2024, 720)? There are countless topics that have moved to the forefront of our scholarly discussions following the pandemic which should be extended through research within other crisis contexts. One example is to investigate the ways in which liminality impacts teaching during extreme conditions, including a focus on the ‘specific precarities, tensions and insecurities’ that manifest in these spaces (Glover, Myers, and Collins 2024, 4). Another example is to examine the hidden curriculum as a background for exploring adoption and integration of both critically reflexive practices (Hibbert and Wright 2023) and micro activism initiatives aimed at raising awareness of responsibility through justice, equality, diversity, and inclusion practices (Keshtiban, Gatto, and Callahan 2023). The final example we share here is through the lens of a feminist ethic of care and the role of vulnerabilities, subjectivities, and the interwoven and complex nature of the ties ‘binding us to others’ through embodiment and affect (Fotaki 2023, 11).

It is through this type of collaborative engagement with one another and the communities around us that we can harness our potential to be transformative agents within our universities, both becoming ourselves, and nurturing in others, an ‘active, reflective, and empathetic’ approach to our teaching and research (Kuriakose 2018, 174). Relatedly, we have an opportunity to work with colleagues who are, through their daily lived experiences, adapting and improvising in response to disruption and change in their learning and teaching contexts (Hwami 2024; Simpson et al. 2023; Wood et al. 2024). As above, these are places to start our conversations, not end them. There are countless other teaching, research, and scholarly partnership-oriented intersections between care, collaboration, and learning that fall within the nomological network, or dynamic ‘constellation’ of well-being and relationality (White and Jha 2020, 211).

Conclusion

We hope that you are inspired by this call to consider the ways in which you can either begin to take, or extend existing, action to ‘see’ academics who are reaching out for connection and collaboration as they live and work through war and other crises. Here, we are calling upon academics living in non-crisis environments to genuinely and collaboratively harness our power and potential as a large, connected Academy of homines curans to begin to address the ‘increasing abstraction, sterility and self-referentiality of the Academy-at-large’ (Cunliffe 2022, 9). Our colleagues who are living in crisis need us. And we need them too if we are to be fully responsible, informed, ethical, aware, and engaged citizens of the world who teach critically and meaningfully in ways that are ‘shaped by care, concern, relationality, inter-dependence, (and) shared autonomy’ (Deranty, Rhodes, and Yeoman 2023, 806). It is time to move from ‘I’ to ‘we,’ from ‘their’ issues to ‘our’ issues, and to firmly establish ourselves as an active, critical, responsive, and responsible larger academic community that is intentionally and decisively radical in our care practices for each other.

We cannot stress the urgency of this call enough. There are countless crises ravaging the world today. Although the words we share here are shaped by our authors’ lived experience in Ukraine, we are neither alone in our need for engagement and support, nor confident we will receive it in time. As one of our Ukrainian co-authors shares:

We are deeply concerned that interest abroad is decreasing because everyone can feel fatigue from war in various senses - some people are full of information and have no room left for more, others are focused on other places in the world which are also in crisis. It is difficult to absorb so much tragic information mentally. However, for Ukrainians, it is not a matter of bad news, it is our lived experience every day, andwe are ready to give the highest value of human being – our lives – for things which are sometimes taken for granted by others.

Our call is for those of us living in spaces and places of non-crisis to show our colleagues who are living within crisis that we are neither full of information nor satisfied to remain disconnected and isolated from them. We are here, fully recognizing and embracing the absolute interdependence that joins us together in solidarity as partners in learning, teaching, and in life (Fleischmann et al. 2022; Tronto 2017). Every Ukrainian author on this provocation is ready and waiting to hear from you, as are other academics throughout Ukraine and in similar disrupted and fractured crisis environments around the world. We, the authors of this essay, hope to inspire you through our ‘walking the talk’ of care and collaboration through the challenging, emotionally evocative, and vulnerable journey of jointly crafting this call. It has not been an easy journey, with the chaos and uncertainty of our Ukrainian co-authors never knowing what each new hour, day, or week will bring. Our meetings have been cancelled, cut short, and shifted, sometimes because of practical issues like a city-wide power outage so there is no internet, or an air raid, or personal circumstances of unplanned change, disruption, overwhelm, fatigue, or loss. And yet we persisted, drawing upon our commitment to each other and the significance of our work together. It is in that spirit that we share a final gesture of vulnerability, inspiration, and connection. We will end this essay, which has been written as a beginning, as a point of departure, by sharing the following words ‘Побачте нас’ in Ukrainian, meaning ‘see us.’

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Maribel Blasco, Dave Hannah, George Hrivnak, and Helena Liu for their generous and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this call.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).