Women Practicing Resilience Self Care And Wellbeing In Academia

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.

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.

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.

In K-12 education, minority women leaders must navigate a complex maze of challenges that deeply impact their personal and professional lives. The journey of these leaders is marked by a series of starts and stops, demanding an extraordinary degree of resilience, mentorship, and leadership coaching. Despite the theoretical backing and organizational intent, the stark reality is that educational leadership roles for minority women often lack the necessary preparation and concerted efforts essential to supporting their unique needs. The resulting shortfall hampers their ability to sustain success over time. Minority Women in K-12 Education Leadership sheds light on the intersection of gender and ethnicity within educational leadership and addresses the various aspects of minority women's experiences. The objective of Minority Women in K-12 Education Leadership is clear—to provide readers, educational allies, educators, administrators, and stakeholders with a profound understanding of the intersections of gender, leadership, and ethnicity/color in educational leadership. This book goes beyond identifying challenges; it celebrates the resilience of minority women leaders, explores the support systems they rely on, and offers practical strategies for success. The content delves into the physical, mental, emotional, and social dimensions of their experiences, aiming to bridge theoretical and practical concepts and provide valuable insights for practitioners, scholars, and stakeholders.

Self-care involves taking action to support, protect or maintain wellbeing. Relationships have a significant influence on these acts of self-care and one’s sense of wellbeing. Relationships are fundamental to individual meaning-making and crucial to the world of academia. In this edited collection, authors navigate how they view relationships as a crucial part of their wellbeing and acts of self-care, exploring the "I", "We", and "Us" at the centre of self-care and wellbeing embodiment. Each chapter unpacks this idea in varying ways that demonstrate that relationships are a fundamental element of both work and personal life and how they intersect with wellbeing. The authors present critical discussion through visual narratives, lived experiences, and strategies that highlight how relationships, seeking social support, scaffolding opportunities to learn with and from each other, and changes in practise become acts of self-care individually and collectively. There has arguably never been a more important time to raise awareness of self-care and wellbeing as central to the nature of work in higher education. Healthy Relationships in Higher Education: Promoting Wellbeing Across Academia highlights new ways of working in higher education that disrupt current tensions that neglect wellbeing and will be of interest to anyone working in this environment.

Develop resilience and thrive as a care professional! Root Strength: A Health and Care Professionals’ Guide to Minimizing Stress and Maximizing Thriving discusses principles of self-care that can help you prevent emotional fatigue and job burnout in highly stressful workplaces. An evidence-based approach examines how the care professional can develop self-compassion, mindfulness, relationships with co-workers, and perceived satisfaction with one’s career. Written by noted educator and researcher Shannon Dames, this practical manual shows how you can apply these insights on the job and enhance your personal well-being in real-world health care settings. With the prevalence of mental health issues among care professionals — including rates of PTSD and major depressive disorder (MDD) — appearing much higher than that in the general population, never has a resource like this been more required! Focus on both theory and practice allows for self-assessment and the ability to build resilience and thrive, with concepts underpinned by research. UNIQUE! Journeys case studies highlight a care professional’s real-world experience/concerns, encouraging you to think about how you would handle the situation as you read through the chapter; the chapter closes with an effective method to handle the real-life situation, demonstrating how to apply the lessons learned. UNIQUE! Clear and conversational writing style and metaphorical roots/tree framework makes it easier to understand concepts. Practical exercises throughout the text allow you to build and strengthen your own metaphorical roots. Vignettes demonstrate how concepts apply to real-world scenarios. Attuning for the Journey Ahead sums up the content at the end of each chapter, ensuring that you understand the key concepts. UNIQUE! Special boxes contributed by Dr. Crosbie Watler, MD, FRCPC help you understand and navigate through professionals’ mental health challenges.

​This book focuses on the social and societal context of women's mental health. Drawing from multidisciplinary perspectives and scholarship, it pays particular attention to how women's mental health is experienced at the personal level, yet it is influenced by their relationships and interacts with the larger societal context (such as prevailing gender equality policies, income distribution, role burden, peace and security). Specific attention is given to the positive aspects of women's mental health (such as agency, resilience) and how women’s personal relations across diverse domains (such as family, work, neighbourhoods) are constructed and influenced by, and in turn influence, broader societal structures/ policies/ opportunities. A unique feature of this book is that, at the end of each chapter, there is a Response section written by a non-academic such as a community member, practitioner or policy maker in which the invited authors respond to the chapter texts in the form of narrative, poetry, and/or prose, according to their various backgrounds, interests, and experiences.​