The net benefit is collective caring skills. Our interp uses debate to cultivate happy academics who have fun and who care for and about each other sustainably. Centering competitive incentives as a filter for debate generates shame and carelessness, which cause psychic trauma and turn the benefits to their framework.

By approaching the toxicity created by the greedy, neoliberal university amidst the pandemic (Ashcraft, 2017; Smyth, 2017) as a relational issue, we have engaged in shedding light on the entanglements that bind us together with all of our differences and all the filth we usually keep in the shadows (Pagan, 2020). Inspired by feminist critical management scholars' intellectual activism to nurture resistance by writing differently (Ahonen et al., 2020; Contu, 2020; Gilmore et al., 2019) about these toxicities and associated neoliberal politics, we developed an ethic of care sensitive to all kinds of actors and sorts of needs. This includes caring for the flipsides and shameful affects, rendering them non-individual and thus less frightening or risky to share, thereby also turning those precarious truths into potentially liveable, laughable and perhaps somehow also loveable features inherent to academic life these days.

In discussing this further, the vignettes indeed elucidate how toxicity charges us with ugly feelings such as worthlessness, guilt and shame. While guilt relates to our actions, or lack thereof when experiencing toxic passivity, shame relates to us as people; makes us doubt our worth (Sand, 2021). As such, we can sense and embody shame without being able to formulate from where precisely it comes (ibid.). We may simply experience a “foggy sensation of being ‘off’ or out of place, combined with an anxiety of being exposed” (our translation; Sand, 2021, p. 15). Shame can be paralyzing and pacify us. Moreover, the sense of shame easily produces shame about the shame, because we associate shame with weakness, and we are afraid that weakness will lead to our exclusion by others.

Shame – linked to toxicity and greed – is indeed a relational power dynamic (Brøgger, 2016; Staunæs & Brøg-ger, 2020), the performativity of which we may experience individually and tackle differently, but it only works as we continuously relate and compare ourselves to others. For example, as toxicity while in lockdown accelerates isolation, it convinces us that everyone else is fine which makes us feel alone. In some instances, we hustle through by maintaining the façade of being on top of things; whereas some spaces and communities allow for cracks in that façade, enabling honesty and collective care because, as it turns out, nearly everyone struggles. This being the case, we realize that self-care alone will never really suffice; instead, in our understanding, self-care and relational care are always mutually entangled and interdependent (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Hawk, 2011).

To facilitate our ethic of care, we proposed collective writing, where we write our differences together apart, extending the works of scholars already writing differently (Ahonen et al., 2020; Amrouche et al., 2018; Gilmore et al., 2019; Plotnikof et al., 2020). Writing collectives can become discursive, material and affective spaces to voice, breathe, cry and laugh together, as seeing our stories on the page creates release, relief and may make them seem ridiculous, even banal, emphasizing that the individualization and isolation created by toxicity are shared work features and can be remedied collectively, although apart (Chatzidakis et al., 2020).

Baring all of our ugliness, vulnerability, filth and shame in autoethnographic writing exposes us to scrutiny and the risk of emotional harm, considering “who might read this—colleagues, strangers, even enemies” (Vickers, 2002, p. 608). Yet, it is exactly our dragging everything out of the shadows that energizes us and counteracts toxicity as we cry and laugh together, although we are isolated. Further, through writing, care may extend beyond the proximity of us as co-authors – caring for each other in the writing process, connected through online technologies – to include and nurture distant readers too.

Care through writing differences collectively is not a romantic or naive endeavor, we argue. Rather, it is expansive, or “promiscuous,” permitting us to expand the sphere of actors and relations we may care for, as well as experiment with the ways in which we care (Chatzidakis et al., 2020, p. 33). As such, the “de-toxication” we endeavor is not an easy fix or a one size fits all, but a matter of taking seriously the fundamental, relational dynamics of the toxicity created by the neoliberal university with its precarity, injustices and inequalities exacerbated during the pandemic. It is a matter of daring to care for what we are otherwise disgusted by or afraid and ashamed of in ourselves and each other by exposing it and sharing our fragility. Not to overcome it, but to transgress its individualizing, destructive, unhealthy aspects.

Despite toxicity, then, we hope for the possibility of becoming “happy academics” who “have fun and engage in [work] activities that bring pleasure” (Reynolds, 2018); an intrinsic pleasure which is unconnected from being effective and measurably productive but simply achieves experiencing a state of fulfilling flow (Martin, 2011), while also dealing with work pressures in a manner that is sustainable for mental and physical health. Being optimistic, expressing gratitude and being forgiving are also suggested as mental states that academics must cultivate to be happy (Ibid.), which may be true, but such advice also requires us to regulate our subjectivities to perform happiness in specific, moralizing and gendered ways (Ahmed, 2010).