Culture and Organization· 2026Q1
Holding grief in community: witnessing the organizing force of grief
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- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Grief, when held collectively in academic settings through embodied autoethnography and affective witnessing, can act as an organizing force that fosters solidarity and encourages more care-full scholarship.
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Key points
- Grief can be analyzed as an affective condition and force that influences academic organizing and relations.
- Collective embodied autoethnography and affective witnessing were used to explore shared grief.
- Holding grief in community fostered solidarity and reshaped participants' ways of being.
- Shared grief can act as an organizing force, guiding scholars toward more care-full research and academia.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
In this paper, we analyze how grief organizes us and our relations in academic work. Through engaging in collective embodied autoethnography and affective witnessing of each other’s grief, we explore grief as an affective condition and force that flows between bodies, and contend that grief needs space in academic life. Bearing witness to grief, surrendering to and staying with it, we have nurtured bonds of solidarity and been moved to reshape our ways of being in relation to each other, ourselves, and the world. Based upon our experience of shared vulnerability and connection, we suggest that grief held in community may act as an affective organizing force: an interruption, guide and teacher that urges us towards becoming more care-full scholars, opening ethico-political possibilities for doing research and academia differently.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Culture and Organization, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Cultural Studies
Cultural StudiesSocial Sciences