Tipping Toward a New Academic Consciousness

The COVID-19 pandemic and racial reckoning of 2020-2021 have led many faculty in higher education to see the profession and their place in it in a new light (Walton 2022). While people are broadly engaged in a large-scale cultural re-evaluation of work, labor conditions, and equity, this awakening has posed an existential threat to many academics' senses of identity, purpose, and community. Through autoethnographic narratives, the authors make meaning of this tipping point through the feminist intersections of space, power, and consciousness. The authors explore coaching and mutual mentoring as strategies for creating and holding space for disrupting these norms and expectations and for reimagining mentoring, collaboration, and collective action in ways that respond to our current realities and to changing academic work, moving us toward professional work that supports faculty flourishing.