Welcome friends! We are thrilled you are here alongside us as we launch our new book, “The Critical Friendship Revolution: Leading Ethical Practice Through Authentic Relationships” and this website! We know some of you personally through our teaching, research, and speaking and some of you are brand new here to our community! We wanted to share a memory about why we started passionately focusing on critical friendship so you can learn a bit more about us. We’ll be here adding more to our unguarded conversations so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our posts.
When we were both working as contract academics, we got paired for a research project together and it went well! We learned a lot from each other and it was an enjoyable experience. Our professors liked the way we worked so they continued pairing us together and over time, we were a bit of a duo when it came to research. At the time, Taunya was also teaching a course at the university and our careers were budding. We had similar CVs and interests but our research programmes were different and our favourite methodologies were different too (do other people have favourite methodologies? We do!). Before the next academic year began, Taunya’s chronic illness began sending some major messages that she needed to take a step back and focus on wellness. She applied for a leave of absence and Courtney filled in to teach her class. When this happened, the comments started flooding in! People pulled Courtney aside and asked if Taunya hated her for “stealing her class”. People told Taunya to “watch out for Courtney” and people told Courtney to “capitalise on this and try to snag her class permanently”.
Wow! Our working friendship was suspicious to everyone in our circles! People wanted us to be competitors and could only see us as becoming more successful if we ditched the friendship and went lone wolf in our careers. We knew better than to do that. We valued our friendship more than we valued giving into people’s opinions. We had already read research about critical friendship and we knew we needed to bring this into our academic program. We started studying more intensively (while also growing our own research programmes and our families!) and began publishing and presenting research about critical friendship in the academic space. Now with over 10 years of critical friendship research under our belts, we are ready to take critical friendship to the next level!
Our book is due to be released very soon, we have developed a workshop series, and we will be here, in our unguarded conversations blog, about twice a month to share some behind-the-scenes details about our critical friendship. We can’t thank you enough for joining us and helping to bring the critical revolution forward!
Have a great day from your CFs!