Embodiment in Academia: Slowing Down to Sustain Ourselves and Each Other

Posted on: 10 June 2025 by Sandra Abegglen, Annapurna Menon, Kelsea Costin, and Fabian Neuhaus in Conference & Event Reports

CIE Guest Blog Post by Sandra Abegglen, Annapurna Menon, Kelsea Costin, and Fabian Neuhaus - based on our asynchronous Islands of Innovation 2025 presentation.

Introduction

As part of the 2025 Theme Park Islands of Innovation conference—a virtual gathering of educators exploring bold, playful reimaginings of higher education—we created an asynchronous presentation set in the Enchanted Forest. This immersive, self-paced experience invited participants to step off the well-trodden path and into a space of curiosity, creativity, and critical reflection. Rooted in the conference theme, The Playful University, the forest became a metaphorical landscape where we could challenge assumptions, embrace uncertainty, and explore what learning might feel like when we loosen the grip of traditional academic structures. This blog post offers a glimpse into that journey. Come wander with us!

The Conference

The 2025 Theme Park Islands of Innovation conference made innovative use of the online platform SpatialChat (see demo) to foster global inclusivity and accommodate participants across time zones. This dynamic environment supported both synchronous and asynchronous sessions, while also allowing for spontaneous, impromptu conversations and chance encounters—bringing a festival-like feel to the conference. The platform also enabled integration with tools like Padlet (viz. open main event Padlet), where our presentation, along with others, was hosted to encourage interaction and collaboration. While navigating the playful, immersive space could sometimes be challenging in terms of wayfinding, it ultimately added to the sense of exploration. All in all, it was a creative, enriching, and delightfully playful experience.

Our Contribution

Figure 01: Academic Wintering Book Cover

Our conference contribution built on our open-access publication Academic Wintering: Embracing Warmth, Inclusion and Renewal in Higher Education (2025). This work emerged from personal experiences and feedback from staff and students alike. In the neoliberal university—where metrics often matter more than meaning, and productivity is prioritised over pause—winter can feel especially heavy. As the days grow shorter and colder, academic demands don’t ease; they often intensify. Deadlines loom, energy wanes, and expectations remain unrelenting. For those who don’t conform to the traditional academic mold—racialized, queer, menstruating, neurodivergent, disabled, and chronically ill scholars, among others—winter brings not only physical discomfort but additional emotional and structural burdens.

Academic Wintering was born in response to these realities. It is a creative, open, and transdisciplinary collaboration that asks:

"What does it mean to “winter” in academia? How can we navigate seasonal shifts—physical, emotional, intellectual—while caring for ourselves and our communities? What might it look like to honour slowness, to acknowledge the body’s need for rest, and to teach and learn differently in colder times?"

This project resists dominant narratives of relentless output. Instead, it invites practices rooted in warmth, care, and solidarity. From candles in classrooms to cozy reading corners; from checking in on student well-being to granting permission to rest - Academic Wintering is about more than survival. It offers a reimagining of how we might thrive during winter, by centring bodies, labour, and the rhythms of the season. We hope it creates space to think relationally about our work in academia, encouraging reflection on embodiment and its significance in resisting the pressures of the neoliberal university.

The open-access book that has grown from this collaboration brings together personal reflections, creative contributions, and practical strategies from educators across disciplines. At its heart is a call: to recognize winter not as something to push through, but as a season with its own wisdom, tempo, and potential for renewal.

Figure 02: Academic Wintering Page

Reflective Questions on Academic Wintering

Whether you are an educator, student, or academic staff member, these questions (also posed to participants at the Islands of Innovation 2025 event) can support you in making sense of your own wintering—and perhaps inspire new ways of being and teaching:

Personal Experience and Connection

• How does the shift into winter affect your energy levels and overall well-being in your teaching and academic work?
• Are there particular challenges you face during the winter months that feel different from other times of the year?

Teaching and Learning Practices

• How do you adjust your teaching practices to respond to the seasonal changes of winter?
• What strategies have you found effective in maintaining student engagement and motivation during the darker, colder months?
• Have you integrated any creative or reflective activities that help foster a sense of warmth and connection in your classroom during winter?

Care and Well-Being

• In what ways do you encourage students to care for themselves and each other during winter?
• What small comforts or rituals help you and your students navigate the winter season more smoothly?
• How do you create spaces for rest and renewal within your academic work and teaching practices? 

Reflection and Growth

• How can you embrace the slower rhythm of winter to enhance teaching and learning?
• How can you intentionally create time and space for reflection on your academic and personal practices as the seasons shift?
• In what ways can you weave rest and renewal into your academic work and teaching practices?

 Future Possibilities

• What new practices or approaches could you introduce to make winter a more supportive and enriching time for yourself and your students?
• How might your insights about wintering inspire broader changes in academic culture and well-being throughout the year?

Figure 03: Academic Wintering Page

To Conclude

Academic Wintering reminds us that even in the coldest season, care can be radical. We can choose warmth. We can choose slowness. We can choose to honor bodies and lives as they are—not as the university demands them to be. We recognize that this may feel difficult and in the race for promotions, grants, publications, un-doable, but it demands an awareness from us of our priorities and strategies for survival. This knowledge can make room not just for survival, but for transformation.

Join us in reflecting, sharing, and reimagining what embodiment in academia could look like—together. And, in the spirit of the 2025 Theme Park Islands of Innovation conference, let’s welcome back play and playfulness as essential parts of how we think, feel, teach, and learn.

Acknowledgements

Academic Wintering has been generously supported by the Richard Parker Initiative and the Pedagogies for Social Justice Blog.

The Book

Access the full Academic Wintering collection on the Pedagogies for Social Justice Blog via the University of Westminster.

Editorial Team: Sandra Abegglen, University of Calgary, Canada; Annapurna Menon, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom; Kelsea Costin, University of Westminster, United Kingdom. Fabian Neuhaus, University of Calgary, Canada

Graphic Design: Bridgette Crabbe, MPlan Student, University of Calgary, Canada

Contact: Sandra Abegglen, sandra.abegglen@ucalgary.ca