Shweta Krishnan

With the support of the Global Initiative Grant, we created a workshop “Chrysalis: Collaboration as Care” that devised strategies to address the exhaustion that early career scholars feel amidst recent geopolitical and environmental events, the global pandemic, and the planetary effects of climate change. Chrysalis took inspiration from the pupal stage of a butterfly’s metamorphosis, and asked what it would mean to emerge differently from the cocoon of our doctoral programs. We brought together a transnational cohort of early-career academics from US, Canada, UK, EU, South Africa, Columbia, Chile, India, Singapore, and Australia. We implemented the grant between October 2023 and June 2024, dividing our labor into a planning phase (October–December 2023), an implementation phase (January–May 2024), and a post-programmatic analytical phase (June 2024). The workshop was divided into the following activities, repeated over the course of four months: 1) reflective prompts for participants to engage critically and in an embodied manner 2) 2-3 guest speakers 3) team-building exercises 4) open hours. Collaborating through virtual meetups and forum posts, we learned to build self-care and response-ability into research, teaching, service. Going forward, Chrysalis will shift to a Google Forum to continue supporting the alumni and building collaborative endeavors.