Tending to ourselves, tending to each other: Nurturing feminist friendships to manage academic lives

This chapter explores howtwo feminist academics and close collaborators have tried to navigate the patriarchal hierarchies of traditional academic spaces. We unpack how those relational ways of knowing and being in the world have supported our living as women in academic worlds, how we have together navigated the pressures that discourage collaboration, and how those pressures affect us individually and as partners. Our epistemology of friendship empowers us to disrupt the institution and explore what that looks like in our day-to-day experiences as women, mothers, academics, friends, sisters, daughters, and teachers. It is important to consider our epistemology of friendship as means of resistance that sustains ourselves and our partnerships and within sometimes oppressive institutions.