Between rigour and care: technology-mediated interdisciplinary knowledge production in the academy

This article examines the relationship between academic rigour and care in interdisciplinary knowledge production. Drawing on critical management studies, feminist epistemology, and recent work on the extractive university (Burawoy et al, 2024), we analyse our own practice as a transnational research collective. Where recent scholarship treats tempered radicalism as a condition for alternative organizing, we propose a further concept, Relational Rigour: an epistemic competence in which the quality of critical inquiry depends on the quality of the affective infrastructure that sustains it. Through the case of a mundane chat platform, we trace how technology-mediated care can move beyond false care to build a prefigurative infrastructure that resists the commodification of academic time. Our genealogical analysis suggests that our capacity to critique a complex system, the financialization of food, developed alongside our attention to joy and care rather than despite it. We also examine the strongest objection to our own argument – that collective care may reproduce the insecurity it appears to answer – and we set out what our case can and cannot settle. We conclude that under conditions of alienated academic labour, care is not a soft alternative to rigour, but one of its conditions of possibility.