Through a lens of self-care and wellbeing, this book shares stories of struggle and success from a diverse range of women in academia. Each story highlights how these women mitigated and overcame various barriers as part of their academic trajectory and provides practical strategies for maintaining self-care and wellbeing. Taken from lived experience, the autoethnographic narrative approach provides a deeper, personal understanding of the obstacles faced by women throughout an academic career and guidance on how these might be navigated in a way that avoids self-sacrificing. This collection goes further to illustrate the ways that higher education institutions can be more accommodating of the needs of women.

This book illuminates international voices of those who feel empowered to do things differently in higher education, providing inspiration to those who are seeking guidance, reassurance, or a beacon of hope. Doing things differently comes with an awareness and curiosity to explore what can be. Increasingly, more and more professionals in higher education are choosing themselves, happiness, families, relationships, kindness, and compassion over arbitrary notions of institutional prestige, continuous pressure to overwork, and competitiveness with others. The chapters in this book do more than highlight flaws in the system, they call for proactive engagement in interrupting and reimagining what is broken. The authors share their own experiences as a way of encouraging readers to take small steps towards self-care, to notice their surroundings, and to embrace change as an empowering tool. The focus is on becoming the change we aspire to see, with a collective readiness to instigate positive transformations. Sharing ambitious ideas to encourage change, this book is a valuable resource for those seeking to enhance their self-care and wellbeing in the higher education context, and for those seeking to engage with others in support of these efforts.

There has been much recent commentary regarding a ‘crisis’ in academic mental health and wellbeing. This Research Handbook showcases cutting-edge studies and insightful narratives on the wellbeing of doctoral students, early career researchers, and faculty members, illuminating the current state of academic mental health research. Importantly, authors also offer potential solutions to the increasingly poor mental health reported by those working and studying in the higher education sector.

Bringing together international perspectives, this book demonstrates the importance of reframing time in higher education and how we can view it as a resource to support wellbeing and self-care. Time is a central part of our lives and structures our days, and yet often we don’t think about the socially constructed nature of time or how we might reframe our relationship with time and our work in ways that support our self-care and wellbeing. Exploring Time as a Resource for Wellness in Higher Education suggests an alternative way to look at how we structure our time to better support our wellbeing. Drawing on a range of theoretical and personal perspectives, the authors advocate for a reconsideration and reconceptualization of our relationship with time. By sharing their experiences, the authors encourage readers to notice how they spend their time and offer strategies for an intentional focus on the relationship between time, self-care, and wellbeing. Whether it's making time, having time, or investing in time, this book explores strategies and reflections necessary to grow, maintain, and protect wellbeing. This book is a valuable resource for those working in higher education, offering individual, collective, and systemic suggestions and strategies for navigating the ways we see time and wellbeing.

This book provides an evidence-based approach to sustainable self-care, anchoring these strategies in individual academic workers’ core personal values. It teaches readers how to use their values to leverage self-care strategies into a workable, individualized, and effective map to wellness. Working in the demanding environment of higher education can leave little time for self-care, yet making space for wellness and self-care is essential to creating a creative and innovative environment for academic work. This book shows how to create and successfully implement realistic self-care plans. By identifying core values and using these to develop individualized self-care plans, Sustaining Your Well-Being in Higher Education pushes back against a one-size-fits-all approach while also discussing the role of self-care in academic labor activism and providing strategies for readers to become advocates for better self-care practices within their zones of influence. Designed to provide academic workers with the skills they need to develop workable and sustainable self-care plans, this book is an invaluable resource for students and professionals working in all areas of higher education.

Presenting a collective international story, this book demonstrates the importance of compassion as an act of self-care in the face of change and disruption, providing guidance on how to cope under trying conditions in higher education settings. Practising Compassion in Higher Education presents an opportunity to learn through story and by taking proactive action for our wellbeing. It highlights the need to protect and maintain the wellbeing of staff and students, positioning the COVID-19 pandemic as a major catalyst of disruption. The chapters connect theory with lived experience, exploring self-compassion in work and research, compassion in teaching practice and within the personal/professional blur. The book’s contributors bring a range of theoretical and personal perspectives from various global contexts, sharing their own approaches to self-care and how compassion has become a central and crucial element of this practice. This book takes a unique approach to navigating and surviving the higher education environment and offers valuable lessons for the pandemic era and beyond. This will be an essential resource for students and professionals working in all areas of higher education.

This book provides innovative, practical tools to help combat declining personal wellbeing in the higher education workplace. Divided into two sections, the book looks at wellbeing from institutional and individual levels. It outlines a framework for how wellbeing in the higher education workplace can be evaluated and clearly sets out initiatives for what can be done to improve faculty wellbeing. The book also explores issues such as the once vocational nature of academia, the extent to which institutions can provide allied health care and examines initiatives that individual faculty members have introduced for themselves. Representing new ideas, perspectives and a variety of approaches to supporting and promoting wellbeing in the higher education workplace, this book will be of interest to academic staff as well as professional development personnel in higher education.

With a focus on skills development, this book provides guidance on how to navigate transitions between career stages in higher education and how to maintain wellbeing in the process. In a fast-paced and ever-changing environment, a career path in higher education can demand rapid transition. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the kinds of transitions one may face in higher education and how to navigate them successfully while focusing on wellbeing and self-care. Centred around first-person accounts, the chapters illustrate the key issues around transitions and their impacts and provide suggestions for how to adapt through self-care. The authors offer insights from their own personal experiences, enabling the reader to develop an action plan of their own or to share with and guide students and early career mentees. The tools and strategies outlined in the book make up a library of resources that can be called upon at any stage of the journey. Written with all career stages in mind, this book will be an essential resource for new and experienced researchers alike.

This book takes readers on a journey into the experiences, struggles and triumphs of early career researchers in the humanities. In the spirit of guiding emerging scholars and researchers in higher education, the edited volume highlights lived experiences of researchers and ways to navigate the struggles and values of research in the humanities. Featuring 20 unique essays by emergent scholars who weave their personal lives into their research passions, this book offers a window into the experience of researchers in both professional and personal developments. The chapters are accompanied by letters of encouragement and advice from senior researchers who reflect on the role that research has played in their lives. Each chapter further engages with the literature relevant to the topic, firmly grounding the work in the academic field. The book also includes a section on how to use the book, providing prompts for discussion and reflection that encourage self-guided exploration and collaborative reading. Providing inspiration and deep insight, this book is a unique resource for postgraduate students, advanced degree and early career researchers, as well as their supervisors, in the humanities and beyond.

Prioritizing wellbeing alongside academic development, this book provides practical advice to help students write well, and be well, during their PhD and throughout their career. In this unique book, Katherine Firth offers expert guidance on developing a writing practice and avoiding burnout, providing strategies and insights for developing a sustainable writing career beyond the PhD thesis. The book covers every stage of the academic writing process, from planning and researching, through getting words on the page, to the often unexpectedly time-consuming editing and polishing. Readers are reminded that writing a thesis is hard work, but it needn’t be damaging work. Each chapter includes a toolbox of strategies and techniques, such as meditations, writing exercises and tips to maintain physical wellbeing, that will help doctoral candidates start writing and keep writing, without sacrificing their health, wellbeing or relationships. Relevant at any stage of the writing process, this book will help doctoral students and early career researchers to produce great words that people want to read, examiners want to pass and editors want to publish.