This project studies how our subjectivities shape the process of becoming a research collaborative. It is an empirically-informed depiction of an intimate learning space, where (digital) community is co-created by sustained commitment to each other and to an ideal of just relationality in academic knowledge production. “How do we do this? …We want to be part of the academic machine, right? We want to be part of what academia is, but we’re at a distance. We’re coming with different sort of perspectives, different theoretical commitments, and we have different things going on […] So, we start with who is here now, and that’s what we work with” (analysis meeting, round 1) We are a scholarly collaborative of learning-teachers/teaching-learners whose first encounter in an online master’s program offered through a Swedish university became the point of departure for this inquiry into the co-construction of sustainable digital education. Our relationship, initially structured by institutional frameworks within an online course (titled Educating for Widening Participation and Inclusion in Higher Education) evolved into something differently profound: a community of inquiry committed to challenging sedimented borders and hierarchies. In this paper, we explore how intentionality co-constructs a location of possibility (hooks 1994) within higher education’s online frontier. By analyzing video diaries as situated knowledges (Haraway 1988), we examine how digital interactions across geographic distances and cultural differences lead to scholarly inquiry centering relationality in the co-construction of alternative academic habitats, with a specific aim to promote social justice. The theoretical point of departure is postcolonial theory (Spivak 1993) a lens to examine our collective subjectivity as educators while grappling with diverse genders, races, sexual orientations, and nationalities. Employing the epistemic view that learning is affective, embodied and situated (Macdonald 2013), this is an empirically-informed and reflexive inquiry. Inspired by walking methodology (Springgay and Truman 2018), video diaries were created as an autoethnographic data source. The diaries were viewed and collaboratively analyzed through iterative critical discussions. Major emergent themes are widening participation, sustainable praxis, diverse becomings, and inclusive belonging. Tensions in inclusive belonging were significant, where performative inclusion often masked racialized and gendered exclusions. In addition, sustainable praxis was developed across geographies, language, time zones, and cultures. This inquiry reveals how contemplating teaching and learning in the digital space as an entangled pedagogy (Fawns 2022) opens new possibilities for scholarship.
