Kindness as Water in the University
Kindness as Water in the University

Summary/Abstract: If kindness were a thing, what would it look like? A rose without thorns? A cat without claws? Acts of kindness are often associated with feelings of warmth and softness: things that makes us feel comfortable, cared for. When we think of kindness as a form of activism, however, we find ourselves likening it to water: a liquid body of micro-resistances that can carve out routes in rock. As academics working in the often unkind institutional context of the neoliberal university, we experience kindness as an activism that is flowing, that pools around and seeps into the solid form of the neoliberal university, being shaped by and shaping it. Such kindness could be viewed as weak, when up against strong institutional structures and policies. Yet we find value (and even power) in the weakness of kindness, a gesture that emboldens us to move away from anthropocentric, proprietary and competitive modes of relating to others in the university, towards relations with them that are multi-specific, non-proprietary and collaborative. This article explores a liquid ethics of kindness through interleaving the forms of essay, story and poem: one apparently stable, the others flowing around and through it.

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