This paper responds to the call for creative and intersectional research practices in management and organizational studies. By leveraging feminist and collaborative methodologies, we address the complexities of intersectionality through a reflective exploration of our lived experiences as Asian women academics in European contexts. Our methodological approach builds on autoethnography (AE) and collaborative autoethnography (CAE), inspired by recent feminist collaborative scholarship. It is further enriched by critical reflexivity and reflexive retrospection, culminating in the development of “critical reflexive retrospection” as a central element in our feminist collaborative writing. This approach allows us to examine the intersections of race, gender, and invisibility in academia through both self- and other-oriented in retrospection, grounded in feminist affective solidarity and relational care. By integrating these methodologies, we generate and mobilize feminist ethics within the collaborative research and writing process. This enables us not only to unravel culturally and institutionally sanctioned inequalities experienced on an individual level but also to cultivate agentic strengths for subversive actions and creative change. As such, the most significant outcome of our feminist, collaborative, reflexive research lies in its capacity to foster transformative, actionable insights.

This work critically examines the issues of gender, race, and the dominant masculine and patriarchal culture in Western academia by centralizing the dynamics of (in)visibility and hypervisibility among East Asian women academics. The findings reveal a nuanced understanding of how minority individuals experience (in)visibility and hypervisibility, moving beyond rigid categorizations and the tendency to frame them as either entirely positive or negative. Instead, these states exist on a continuum, shaping an 'in-betweenness' experience, which can often serve as a source of agency, enabling individuals to navigate feelings of foreignness, the pressure to assimilate into the majority, and actively engaging to making unique contributions in their work. These findings contribute to critiquing and supplementing the conceptualization of (in)visibility among minority members while also highlighting the unique experiences of East Asian women in Western academia.

This study aims to highlight how individual experiences serve as epistemic resources in disability management by examining how differently-abled individuals respond to and resist exclusionary and essentializing mechanisms within organizational equality, diversity, and inclusion interventions, particularly in relation to the sameness-difference dilemma. Using empirical data from observations and interviews with deaf employees in a performing arts organization, we analyze how these individuals navigate a work environment shaped by hearing norms and initiate change. Our findings reveal that deaf employees resist framing their needs as economic burdens within ableist discourses, asserting their right to be different and adapting to dominant hearing structures by assuming influential roles and collaboratively effecting changes. Through these actions, they broaden the concept of able-bodiedness within organizational contexts, foster critical reflexivity, engage in learning, and enrich organizational knowledge. Building on this, we propose the concept of full inclusion, moving beyond mere critiques of ableist practices in diversity management. This approach provides an alternative epistemic pathway for reflexive organizational learning rooted in differently-abled individuals’ experiences, encouraging organizations to view “others” as essential knowledge resources to mitigate the sameness-difference dilemma within ableist norms.

This study challenges the prevailing collaboration norms within academia, which predominantly adhere to meritocratic principles favoring masculine and individualistic values. These principles often result in a productivity paradigm centered on publications and high research performance. We contend that such collaboration norms perpetuate exclusionary practices, limiting the participation of women and individuals who do not neatly conform to the criteria of high productivity. Drawing inspiration from Long and colleagues' work in 2020, and guided by relational care ethics, we developed the notion that collaboration as a feminist strategy represents a transformative process of reflexive becoming and co-learning, emphasizing connectedness and generativity through care. Our findings highlight that through the lens of care, we transcended differing viewpoints, transitioning from self-centeredness to an other-oriented approach characterized by empathy, mutual understanding, and acceptance. Emotions emerged as embodied forms of knowledge, enriching the process of co-learning and co-becoming. Based on this, we propose a new constellation of Feminist Caring Collaboration in the academy, emphasizing the inclusivity of diverse participants and their varied skills and competencies, with full consideration of individuals' needs and future growth opportunities. Furthermore, we advocate for a broader acknowledgment of emotions such as satisfaction, joy, friendship, and pleasure in the knowledge production process, recognizing their significance in individuals' fulfillment in work and various life circumstances.

Touch mediates relations between self-other, writers, and readers; it is material and affective. This paper is the outcome of writing touch as a collaborative activity between eight women writers across different times and locals. In sharing experiences of touch during and beyond the pandemic, we engage with collaborative writing articulated here as colligere, involving the assembling of writing in a holding space. The meanings and feelings of touch arise from our distinct writer positionalities as we think, work, and write in and about life, research, organizations, and organizing. We suggest that writing that reflects on/through touch presents epistemic vulnerability and openness to unknowing in the nexus of intercorporeal relationships. Writing touch contributes to writing and doing academia differently, particularly by offering sensorial encounters that reframe the ethico-political conditions of academic knowledge creation.

This article explores how ethical agency, as other-oriented caring, emerged from feelings of being different in a cultural organization by drawing on feminist ethics of care. By analyzing interview material from an ethnographic study, we centralize the relationship between feelings of being different, vulnerability and the development of sensibilities, practices and imaginaries of care. We elaborate on how vulnerability serves as a ground for caring with rather than for others, and illustrate how it allowed individuals to challenge both organizational, normative diversity discourses and essentialization of differences. We contribute to the literature on critical diversity management by furthering problematizations of instrumental diversity management from the perspective of care, and to the organizational literature on feminist care ethics by empirically exploring how ethical agency emerges from tensions related to feeling different. While previous studies have shown how marginalized individuals use their sense of otherness to negotiate, conform to and resist organizational norms, practices and discourses, we provide further insights on how it also can drive concern and care for others, and thus serve as possible ground for ethical change initiatives within organizations.