It’s the first time we’ve met on Zoom in a few months. “Well, two people have different colour hair since the last time we spoke, so I know I’m in the right place,” says Genavee Brown, assistant professor of psychology at Northumbria University.
We all laugh both because it’s a cliche and because it’s true. But I also feel something else, something deeper and more reassuring; this comment signals to us that we all belong to each other, that we share a kind of kinship that runs deeper than just being colleagues on a research project. It dilutes any implied hierarchies based on seniority. It’s joyful.
I am part of a seven person research team working on queer joy. This ESRC-funded work led to the formation of an all-queer academic team, and the experience of doing this work was unlike most other collaborations we have known in the academy. Through this process, we’ve learned that joy isn’t a nice by-product of good leadership, rather it’s one of the mechanisms through which distributed leadership actually functions.
We find that joy is not a distraction from academic seriousness, it’s one of the core conditions that makes serious work even possible under current conditions. Opening a Zoom call with laughter unclenches our guts and sets the tone for the rest of the hour – this is a place of safety, witnessing, and play. What better conditions are there for generative, rigorous intellectual work?
Joy versus fragmentation
By comparing our experiences together with our experiences elsewhere, we have realised that without joy, “distributed leadership” too often collapses back into informal hierarchy based on seniority – or silenced burnout. We reason that the absence of joy is at least partially responsible for this collapse. If joy means welcoming our humanity within and against institutional norms, then its absence will strangle the voice of the early-career researcher with journalism exprience, the insights sex work can bring to how we organise workshops, the need of a senior member of staff to take time off and not lead on the task.
Ben Dalton, principal lecturer at Leeds School of Arts, is part of the team and distills this dynamic well:
I think our willingness to value each other can feel quite rare, particularly the way some academics might get caught up on how long or short someone has been around, or the status of one institution over another, or academic rank, or the standing of differing disciplines, or accents, or whatever.
Working together over the last three years has given us clear, applied examples that when authority is relational rather than positional, affective conditions do real organisational work that helps us make the university somewhere it’s still worth being. This deserves some serious consideration. And making the university somewhere worth being in turn helps to make life somewhere it feels good to be.
Part of the reason the distributed leadership in our team of seven academics of varying levels of seniority has worked so well and felt so good is because, as Ben says:
There are times when we are able to delight in or recognise something as important that might have been left out or derided as not proper. Similarly our own lives have been allowable parts of how we connect and communicate, but also where we draw insight or expertise from; pets, parenting, sex work, art-making, personal wellbeing, housing, and so on have all featured in our citations as well as personal lives.
Taken together, this welcoming of our wholeness rather than of our professional avatars means that we’ve shielded each other from the type of managed fragmentation that George Hulene described in a recent Wonkhe article as leaving HE professionals “with a nagging internal question: who am I really in this job, and how many versions of me are left?” Our foregrounding of joy as a priority means that we reject normalising “filtering your words so frequently that spontaneous speech starts to feel dangerous.”
Joy is infrastructure
The genuine distribution of agency, responsibility, and authority in our group is mirrored in the methods we use to do our research.
We’ve used collaging – physical tearing up and cutting and sticking of images and text – to work with our collaborators on what queer joy online looks like. In our research workshops as well as in our conversations with each other, playing around is a rigorous methodology of participatory, social, transgressive, creative analysing, theorising and designing. A collage is a great example of a distributed approach where there is sometimes no “correct” viewpoint, and work can happen simultaneously from multiple people as insights occur. It’s a permissive holding space to function within as a group, and feels notably different to many other research groups even if they, too, are nominally using “distributed leadership”.
I am almost loath to mention how traditionally successful and productive the project has been because I don’t want to capitulate to the pressure to justify an idea in neoliberal terms. Suffice to say, we have published and engaged widely on this project, as well as winning an award. At the same time, I do think it’s relevant that one of the most joyful research groups we have ever experienced is also the most prolifically productive of high quality work and real contribution.
We think it’s very unlikely that joy will appear in any KPIs, strategic plans, or job descriptions in the near future, even though it is the fascia that holds institutional bodies together. Feminist scholars have been pointing this out for decades: the emotional, relational labour that actually keeps groups of people functional is invisibilised in institutional language.
If joy is invisible to institutional metrics, it’s not because it is soft or optional, but because our measures are impoverished. The question, then, is not whether joy belongs in leadership, but what kinds of universities we build when we continue to organise as if it doesn’t. Our work has convinced us that joy is not a perk or a reward for surviving the job. It is a form of infrastructure, one that determines whether distributed leadership actually distributes anything at all.
Given that your project was externally funded, there’s nothing neoliberal in the idea that there should be some outcome beyond everyone having a good time.