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The purpose of this paper is to explore a novel storytelling approach that investigates lived experience at the intersection of motherhood/caregiving and Ph.D. pursuits. The paper contributes to the feminist tradition of writing differently through the process of care that emerges from shared stories.

Using a process called heartful-communal storytelling, the authors evoke personal and embodied stories and transgressive narratives. The authors present a composite process drawing on heartful-autoethnography, dialogic writing and communal storytelling.

The paper makes two key contributions: (1) the paper illustrates a novel feminist process in action and (2) the paper contributes six discrete stories of lived experience at the intersection of parenthood and Ph.D. studies. The paper also contributes to the development of the feminist tradition of writing differently. Three themes emerged through the storytelling experience, and these include (1) creating boundaries and transgressing boundaries, (2) giving and receiving care and (3) neoliberal conformity and resistance. These themes, like the stories, also became entangled.

The paper demonstrates how heartful-communal storytelling can lead to individual and collective meaning making. While the Ph.D. is a solitary path, the authors' heartful-communal storytelling experience teaches that holding it separate from other relationships can impoverish what is learnt and constrain the production of good knowledge; the epistemic properties of care became self-evident.

This chapter offers an overview of the field of care ethics as it has developed over the past 40 years. It considers ways in which care and kindness align, are mutually reinforcing or perhaps diverge, in an effort to consider how both might be bolstered in management and organizational studies (MOS), and beyond, in workplace practice. While definitions of care usually focus on the meeting of needs, kindness is less well defined and explored. The chapter examines the possibilities of kindness as a pathway to care, as a component or stage of care, as congruent with care, as an enhancement to or deepening of care, and also how kindness and care might impede each other. Finally, the chapter considers warnings against half-measures when attempting to entrench care and kindness in the workplace of today.