Connectedness and communal thinking in a virtual borderland: Flourishing against the normative

We are fourteen women situated in different higher education spaces across the globe, our microsocial realities continuously connected like networked nodes. Working as women educationalists/leaders/researchers/teachers our becoming is informed by our transdisciplinary and border crossing inquiry and experiences of journeying in and out of each other’s lives. In this chapter we draw on theory and hybridized methods, intuitively embracing the notion of ‘flourishing against the normative', each appreciating and valuing our individual contribution to our work-study-life experiences. We consciously acquaint ourselves with the human and more than human relations extending from the network nodes linking our own microsocial realities to that of others. In re-examining and sharing our worlds and our various avenues of scholarship and theoretical understandings, we have engaged in artistic processes and creative openings which emerged to consider and express our entanglements. Importantly, and with use of poetic inquiry, we convey and explore how engaging with arts-based approaches, including creating found-poems and I-poems from words, ideas and experiences that were shared, has/is serving to inform ways of knowing and learning about the self and others, and in how, being nourished through our collective efforts, we are strengthened, again.