Reimagining the university of our dreams: heterotopic havens for wounded academics

This paper focuses on the experiences of four facilitators of a group mentoring programme for doctoral students aspiring to become academics. The methodology utilised collective sensemaking in a collaborative autoethnography. Aided by agreed reflective prompts, we initially analysed our own and each other’s written accounts. This illuminated the motivations and hopes accompanying us into the project, as well as our individual experience of being a mentor within it. We digitally recorded the discussion of our initial analyses, sharing and debating what we felt our own and each other’s reflections revealed. We subsequently discussed and collaboratively analysed the meeting transcript. This final meta-analytic phase exposed tension-laden emotions and experiences. We theorise that we were operating as wounded academics, seeking to recreate a nurturing academic space where it is simultaneously possible to express, contain and transform contradictory emotions associated with being in the academy. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, we propose that such spaces may also unleash a sense of hope and possibility for contemporary academic life.