Promoting communal care for wellbeing in graduate education: Community building, belonging, and navigating the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Academia is a stressful occupation. Globally, faculty report stressors related to mounting expectations for research and scholarly productivity in the context of simultaneously increasing instructional workloads, administrative duties, and student expectations. As a result of these increased demands and expectations, faculty report experiences of intense stress, worry, depressed mood, emotional exhaustion, diminished self-care, and overall sense of compromised wellbeing. This chapter explores self-care within graduate education and argue for the inclusion of communal care practices to support wellbeing. It positions community building as a communal care practice that extends traditional notions of self-care. It also adopts reflexive ethnography to unpack the subjective experiences of wellbeing, including those incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter utilizes Bronfenbrenner's (1994) ecological theory of human development to deconstruct the sense of belonging and efforts to build community within academia, reflecting on resulting impacts on wellbeing. It identifies microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem factors that facilitated or impeded the efforts to build community in context of the social-cultural locations as faculty. The chapter highlights the importance of modeling self-care through community building in graduate-level practice, scholarship, and policy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)