We met as postdoctoral researchers in the 2018-2020 cohort of the Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership, funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
As our program was ending we began ask what it might it look like for us to stay together – particularly while navigating the challenges of precarity and translocation endemic to postdoc life. With the guidance and support of the program’s hosts and external facilitators from the Altekio cooperative (https://altekio.es/en/team/) we crafted a vision of the Careoperative as a living experiment in collective leadership.
One of our most durable commitments has been a focus process, not academic outputs. Since 2019, we’ve enjoyed monthly online meetings centering sociocratic decision-making methods; holding space for navigating new sets of responsibility as we advance in our careers; and celebratory dance parties along the way. We do our best to share our work and perspective through conferences, blogs, and publications, but we’re most motivated by supporting each other as we live new ways of being sustainability practitioners and researchers.
Four values orient everything we do. These values underpin our code of collaboration.
Care
We care for ourselves and each other as colleagues, not just as researchers. Caring for people — their time, their creative resources, their lives outside the academy — forms part of a broader commitment to caring for the planet and society. An ethic of care underpins our non-hierarchical, non-competitive ways of collaborating.
Reflexivity
We study ourselves and our group dynamic. Reflexivity means asking not only what we are researching, but how our own values, backgrounds, and limitations shape how we show up and what we do. It requires deliberate space for honest critical reflection — even when, especially when, that is uncomfortable.
Inclusivity
We work to remedy the systematic ways people are excluded from academic leadership — by gender, ability, race, class, discipline, caring responsibilities. Inclusivity means actively broadening the range of perspectives, ideas, and styles of leadership that are recognized as legitimate.
Collectivity
Responsibility, authorship, and leadership are shared across the careoperative. Rather than maximizing individual outputs, we invest in collective processes: distributed decision-making, rotating facilitation and group stewardship, joint writing, shared credit. We are happy to trade speed for solidarity as it allows everyone's ideas to be included and negotiated.
The Careoperative publishes collectively under the name O. Care — or, in more recent work, Dr. Care. Dr. Care appears as first author on all collective papers; remaining authors follow in alphabetical order. We chose this approach as a practical solution to and a deliberate statement about issues with authorship in academic work.
Academic publishing tends to reward the individual at the front of the list. First-authorship signals prestige, drives citation metrics, and shapes careers. By writing under a shared pseudonym, we challenge the idea that one person's contribution is any more foundational than another's. A first-author pseudonym with alphabetical listing recognizes the varied but essential contributions of every member — to the learning, the reflection, and the writing that produce each paper.
The Careoperative is, as we first called it, a living experiment — one that has now been running for more than seven years. We have produced research, published together, and brought what we have learned into the sites, classrooms, and organizations where we work. We have also had to navigate conflict, changing circumstances, and the ordinary difficulties of sustaining something collective over time.
This site is an introduction to our experiment. The pages that follow describe who we are as individuals, what we have made together, the practices we deploy, and the places where our work has been nourished.
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