Interspace for empathy : engaging with work-related uncertainty through artistic intervention in management education

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Interspace for empathy : engaging with work-related uncertainty through artistic intervention in management education © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published version Lafaire, Ana Paula; Kuismin, Ari; Moisander, Johanna; Grünbaum, Leni Lafaire, A. P., Kuismin, A., Moisander, J., & Grünbaum, L. (2022). Interspace for empathy : engaging with work-related uncertainty through artistic intervention in management education. Culture and Organization, 28(3-4), 227-244. https://doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2022.2029442 2022 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gsco20 Culture and Organization ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gsco20 Interspace for empathy: engaging with workrelated uncertainty through artistic intervention in management education Ana Paula Lafaire, Ari Kuismin, Johanna Moisander & Leni Grünbaum To cite this article: Ana Paula Lafaire, Ari Kuismin, Johanna Moisander & Leni Grünbaum (2022): Interspace for empathy: engaging with work-related uncertainty through artistic intervention in management education, Culture and Organization, DOI: 10.1080/14759551.2022.2029442 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2022.2029442 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 24 Jan 2022. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 41 View related articles View Crossmark data Interspace for empathy: engaging with work-related uncertainty through artistic intervention in management education Ana Paula Lafaire a , Ari Kuismin b , Johanna Moisander a and Leni Grünbaum a a Department of Management Studies, Aalto Business School, Helsinki, Finland; b Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT How can artistic intervention facilitate empathic engagement with workrelated uncertainty in postgraduate management education? To examine this, we theorize artistic intervention as creating an interspace of temporarily suspended organizational norms through which empathy as relational knowing can emerge between participants. Drawing on an ethnographic study entitled Becoming in Academia, a nine-month artistic intervention conducted by a group of doctoral students in a Nordic business school (NBS), this paper highlights how an interspace for empathic engagement with work-related uncertainty was created by the participants through three intervention activities: aligning oneself to the other,narrating a collective validation, and acknowledging the agency of the other. In contributing to arts-based management education research, the paper theorizes and empirically elaborates on empathic knowing as emerging from activities of artistic intervention, opening an interspace, and providing new insight into arts-based methods as means for engaging with uncertainty within management education. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 1 January 2021 Accepted 11 January 2022 KEYWORDS Empathy; arts-based methods; doctoral education; uncertainty; storytelling; interspace Introduction To drop the tools of rationality is to gain access to lightness in the form of intuitions, feelings, stories, improvisation, experience, imagination, active listening, awareness in the moment, novel words, and empathy. All of these nonlogical activities enable people to solve problems and enact their potential. (Weick 2007, 15) Scholars have recently argued that arts-based teaching and learning methods (i.e. pedagogical techniques and procedures that are based on using various branches of the arts) (Nissley 2010) can offer a range of promising tools for rethinking management learning and education (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015; Chemi and Du 2017; Darsø 2016; Kostera and Wozniak 2020; Taylor and Ladkin 2009). Arts-based methods are seen to help us think and see differently from ‘a fresh perspective’ and to evade ‘our old habits of mind’that tend to orient us toward ‘stock responses’(Eisner 2008, 11). Furthermore, by engaging our senses in different ways, arts-based methods activate the many embodied and emotional dimensions of learning, thereby inviting multiple ways of knowing (Kostera and Wozniak 2020; Strati 2007). Art and arts-based methods, thus, are argued to not only help us learn and gain knowledge beyond the logico-rational, narrowly defined boundaries of the field of management education but also unlock and enact the full range of our potential as © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. CONTACT Ana Paula Lafaire ana.lafaire@aalto.fiDepartment of Management Studies, Aalto Business School, Ekonominaukio 1, 02150, Espoo, Finland CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION https://doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2022.2029442 ‘whole human beings’(Darsø 2016, 22; Kostera and Wozniak 2020; Otto and Strauß 2019; Springborg 2010). In much of the existing research on management education, the value of arts-based methods is discussed in relation to the increasingly complex, if not chaotic, nature of organizational environments (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015; Kostera and Wozniak 2020; Ladkin and Taylor 2010; Taylor and Ladkin 2009) and work-related uncertainty (Otto and Strauß 2019) in which many business school graduates, including doctoral students, currently operate. In contemporary society, it is argued that managers, entrepreneurs, and other business professionals often grapple with ‘the unstable, the unknowable, and the unpredictable’(Weick 2007, 15), trying to make sense of ambiguity, uncertainty, and ill-defined problems that are not amenable to linear thinking and the traditional tools of logico-rational decision making that still dominate the field of management education (Moisander and Stenfors 2009). Artistic methods and variations of ‘artful learning’(Darsø 2016, 30) are proposed as helpful tools for navigating these complex and uncertain territories (Ladkin and Taylor 2010;Taylorand Ladkin 2009) as they can be deployed to mobilize what Weick (2007)calls‘nonlogical activities’or modes of knowing. What is more, as Kostera and Wozniak (2020) have argued, engaging with arts may help us not only navigate and cope with uncertainty and not-knowing but also recognize the full worth of the complexity of human existence and organizational life. In this paper, our aim is to contribute to the further development of this field of research by examining how arts-based methods can facilitate empathic engagement with work-related uncertainty within postgraduate management education. While scholars have shown that arts-based methods can cultivate empathy (Eisner 2008; Taylor and Ladkin 2009; van den Akker 2014), what is missing from their accounts is an empirically well-grounded explication of how empathy as a mode of knowing (Campelia 2017) arises in and through artistic intervention, and how it can help learners engage with their lived experience of work-related ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty in new, transformative ways. Focusing on this question is important as it can help us better understand the possibilities, difficulties, and limitations of navigating uncertainties in the increasingly competitive, neoliberal (Bristow, Robinson, and Ratle 2017; Fleming 2020) environments of management education. We build on the work of Campelia (2017), who conceptualizes empathy as a relational practice of knowing aimed at achieving knowledge of how another feels that is formed and confirmed with others. We theorize that artistic intervention in management education can facilitate empathy and empathic engagement with work-related uncertainty by creating an ‘interspace.’Berthoin Antal and Strauß (2015) suggest that interspace is created with artistic intervention and that it suspends the norms and routines of the organization where it unfolds, opening the possibility of thinking and acting differently. It is a social space of ‘co-creative interactions’(Chemi and Du 2017, 329) and ‘constructive disturbance’(Darsø 2016, 22). Thus, this perspective invites us to explore how the participants of artistic intervention within the management education context co-creatively accomplish an interspace for empathic, rather than logico-rational, engagement with experiences of work-related uncertainty –the feeling of being stuck in uncertain work arrangements and a state of permanent temporariness (Otto and Strauß 2019). Empirically, this paper is grounded in an ethnographic study –Becoming in Academia –a ninemonth artistic intervention carried out in an NBS. Organized by two doctoral students, the first and fourth authors of this paper, the intervention consisted of various workshops and collaborative activities targeted especially at doctoral students in business and management. Rather than being designed to solve any predefined problem, the purpose of the intervention was to create an open space where doctoral students could share and reflect on their experiences of working in a competitive and performance-oriented environment. Our analysis of the empirical materials shows how the intervention created an interspace in which the participants were able to engage with work-related uncertainties through empathic knowing. Specifically, we identified three activities through which this interspace was created. In aligning oneself with the other, the participants attuned to work-related uncertainty by constructing a unifying story that brought their experiences 2A. PAULA LAFAIRE ET AL. together; in narrating a collective validation, they specified details of uncertainty by narrating each other’s experiences through metaphorical descriptions; and in acknowledging the agency of the other, the participants created new ways of relating to work-related uncertainty in management education by affirming each other’s experiences with others. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Next, we detail our theoretical framework, focusing on empathic knowing and arts-based methods, and develop the idea of interspace as a source of knowing in an empathic manner within the context of management education. We then introduce our ethnographic data and analyses. We offer our key findings, discuss our contributions, and provide ideas for future research. A relational perspective on knowing, empathy, and artistic interventions Our theoretical perspective is rooted in the premise that human beings exist in relation to others (Fotaki, Kenny, and Vachhani 2017) and are thus neither isolated nor independent entities (Bell and Vachhani 2020). From this perspective, knowing is an ongoing process shaped by humans (peers, educators, authors, academic communities, friends, etc.) and more-than-humans (e.g. computers, weather, books, viruses, government bans, stories, trees, dogs, etc.) that are constantly connecting in different ways (Meriläinen, Salmela, and Valtonen 2021; Otto and Strauß 2019). Therefore, recognizing that knowledge is co-produced through these ‘entangled’encounters –of human bodies, objects, and discourses –shifts the emphasis from information-based impersonal epistemic practices toward openended and relational processes of knowing (Ashcraft 2017; Katila, Kuismin, and Valtonen 2019; Stewart 2007). We suggest that approaching empathy from this perspective has the potential to disrupt conventional ways of learning and knowing in the context of management education. Empathic knowing In our theoretical perspective on empathy as a relational way of knowing, we draw on the work of Campelia (2017), who theorizes empathy as a social epistemic practice and a particular way of embodied knowing. While much of the existing management literature discusses empathy as a cognitive-emotional skill that can be important for understanding other people’s minds and behaviors (Ashforth and Humphrey 1995; King 2011), we propose that empathy can be understood as a relational practice and a mode of knowing in itself. From this perspective, empathy is not something that triggers or enhances knowing and learning; rather, it is a ‘kind of knowledge’(Campelia 2017, 531) and a particular, embodied way of knowing –‘knowing how another feels’(Campelia 2017, 532) – that ensues from interpersonal engagement. Specifically, we conceptualize empathy as a relational epistemic practice that relies on an interdependent and interpersonal process of knowing together with others; it aims to both cognitively and affectively understand and learn from others’emotional experiences. The emphasis is not on ‘gaining information’but rather on the process of attuning to the nuances of the other’s perspective to gain a ‘deeper sense of the agency of the other person’and to grasp the particularities of their emotional experiences and beliefs (Campelia 2017, 539). According to Campelia (2017), empathic knowing involves elements of becoming other-oriented, becoming receptive to others’emotions, becoming nonjudgmental, and communicating back understandings about other people’s emotions and experiences to confirm reliability. It requires the knower to direct his or her attention toward the other and to maintain ‘some sense of distinction between self and other’(Hoffman 2000; Slote 2016, in Campelia 2017, 537). Since the epistemic aim of empathy is to ‘achieve knowledge about how another feels that may not be available through other means’(2017, 541), empathy requires that the knowers affectively attune to another through a relational process. To be attuned to another is to share a certain rhythm by ‘picking up’ a feeling, thus picking ‘each other up’(Ahmed 2014b, 17). Rather than self-projecting, empathic knowing is about staying open to another’s perspective(s), verbal and nonverbal expressions, and CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 3 mirroring them back to communicate what we perceive to confirm the reliability of our understanding. The empathic practice requires that the knowers reflect on their emotions and experiences, guard against false empathy, and maintain appropriate sensitivity toward understanding others’situations (Campelia 2017). It is worth noting that phenomena present in emotional engagements, such as emotional contagion, emotional sharing, and mimicry, are not epistemic in themselves but may be part of the practice of knowing (Campelia 2017, 537). Since this practice is relational and interdependent, instead of a dualistic one-way interaction, the knower and the other are not fixed exclusive categories. This means that empathic knowing may involve the knower simultaneously knowing and understanding the other and feeling understood or known by the other. Furthermore, suspending preconceived, fixed ideas of how some particular experience feels allows for new understanding. Empathic knowing thus enables us to relate and respond differently. Instead of emphasizing the product or object of knowing, it focuses on the relational, processual, and perhaps surprising emergence of knowing as an empathic accomplishment. Thus, to relate in an empathic way is to accept the uncertainty of knowing, since ‘there are ways in which one cannot fully know how another feels’ (Campelia 2017, 541). Such realization is important in itself and becomes an approach to proceed with caution and rectify injustices. This way of knowing requires us to accept vulnerability as part of staying open and receptive (Bell et al. 2020). This is congruent with feminist epistemologies that attend to situated lived experience as a valid site of theorization by ‘making sense of what is happening around, and to us’(Bell et al. 2020, 10; Hooks 1991). Therefore, empathic practice is a legitimate way of creating knowledge about the self, as well as the other, through and with others. The epistemic process can result in different degrees of cognitive and emotional understanding (Campelia 2017). Furthermore, the possibility of relating in new ways to our own experience and feeling understood can bring emotional relief. The relevance of empathic knowing has been empirically demonstrated in medical contexts. For example, Campelia (2017) foregrounds the importance of dialogically confirming the understanding and insights of how a patient feels beyond gathering only standard medical information. Hence, empathic knowing unfolding between a nurse and a patient allows for new insights and a better understanding of the patient’s condition. In this paper, we are interested in how the relational practice of empathic knowing of work-related uncertainty becomes possible through artistic intervention in the context of management education. Specifically, we examine how the exchange can expand beyond standard conversations when engaging in poetic and playful ways of communicating. In the following section, we elaborate on the affective possibilities that art brings to (empathic) knowing. Engaging the arts for relational knowing in organizations In the context of organization and management studies, arts, and arts-based methods have been explored as ways to acknowledge the embodied character of learning and knowing (Berthoin Antal 2014; Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015; Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2013). In particular, we build on studies that understand art not merely as ‘a new instrument for achieving corporate ends’(Sköldberg, Woodilla, and Antal 2015, 9) or a tool for enhancing cognitive learning processes. Rather, we see art as a destabilizing and disturbing force that enables affective experiences and transformative possibilities of knowing (Berthoin Antal 2014; Berthoin Antal, Taylor, and Ladkin 2014; Kostera and Wozniak 2020). For example, scholars have shown how performative arts, such as theater, provide poetic moments that emphasize the embodied and physical motion of norms, roles, and structures (Moriceau and Letiche 2018), confront us by making the familiar strange (Beyes and Steyaert 2021; Brecht 1976), and enable possibilities for emancipatory experiences (Kostera and Wozniak 2020; Steyaert, Beyes, and Parker 2016). Furthermore, scholars suggest that arts-based methods can help individuals develop the capacity to navigate 4A. PAULA LAFAIRE ET AL. uncertainties in creative ways by tapping into embodied knowledge, such as gut feelings and creativity (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015). Moreover, we argue that arts-based methods also enable empathy as a relational way of knowing. In the following section, we elaborate on how art, particularly artistic interventions, can become a powerful force in supporting empathic knowing in management education. Interspace and artistic interventions We understand artistic intervention as a co-creative transformative process that opens up a particular social space, an interspace in which the customary norms embedded in the organizational culture are temporarily suspended to enable experimentation (Berthoin Antal 2019; Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015). Interspace is a ‘temporary social space’(Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015, 39) within which learners engage with the potential of uncertainty in a generative way (Chemi and Du 2017) as emotions and energy are allowed to flow in ways that otherwise would not be possible in the organization (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015). Learners also benefit from different perspectives and the tensions between artistic and rational logic that feed innovation and creativity (Darsø 2016). Furthermore, artistic interventions are practical and imaginative processes in which educators and learners engage with school-or work-related questions (Kostera and Wozniak 2020) by reimagining ‘what seemed immutable,’thus creating new perspectives (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015, 4). The capacity for wonder ‘opens up a collective space’for the surprise of what can happen in a given encounter; thus, it ‘involves a reorientation of one’s relation to the world’(Ahmed 2014a, 183). The spilling of these effects outside of interspace may also have ‘unintended positive impacts’on the rest of the organization (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015, 38), for example, concerning cooperation and solidarity among individuals. From this perspective, an interspace is initiated when learners, educators, and artists join together to unfold the uncertain creative process of artistic intervention. Even if it may at times be frightening or surprising, it is a safe space for exploration (Chemi and Du 2017). The prevailing organizational norms are suspended and preceded by agreed-upon norms among the participants of the artistic intervention, generating a sense of togetherness and complicity. The artist(s) as facilitator and provocateur engage the participants in practical, imaginative activities and steer the process in a certain direction (Kostera and Wozniak 2020). The ‘thirdness’of the interspace, a meeting place of education and art, makes it an ‘empty space’(Brook 1996; in Steyaert, Hoyer, and Resch 2016, 344) for playing and experimentation, beyond the rational-logical approach of problem-solving. The artistic provocations, or ‘constructive disturbances,’aim to ‘defamiliarize the familiar’(Darsø 2016, 24) and activate sensemaking through emotions (Eisner 2008)and embodied senses (Springborg 2012). Hence, such interactions foster different ways for educators and learners to ‘experience new ways of seeing, thinking, and doing’regarding their work and also add ‘value for them personally’(Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015, 39). Artistic interspace for empathic knowing The literature on relational knowing recognizes the epistemic capacity of empathy as a social practice that enables one to relate differently by being open to the affective nature of interpersonal exchanges. This makes it possible to gain deeper knowledge about the self and the other. The literature further shows that artistic interventions foster affective transformative possibilities to relate in different ways and to gain new insights into work-related issues. These approaches lend themselves well to reimagining how management education could better acknowledge various forms of learning and knowing, and to challenging the ideological and rationalistic premises underlying management education (Kostera and Wozniak 2020; Steyaert, Beyes, and Parker 2016). To achieve these ends, scholars point to the importance of ‘ending the body–mind divide in management practice and reflection’(Kostera and Wozniak 2020, 5; Linstead and Höpfl2000). This entails recognizing CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 5 learning and knowing not only as cognitive but also as embodied and emotional processes embedded in cultural dynamics (Kostera and Wozniak 2020). From this perspective, we theorize that artistic interventions as activities can facilitate empathic knowing by creating temporary interspaces that not only disrupt the dominant logico-rational ways of knowing, that are characteristic of management education, but also open new relational, openended, and more empathic ways of knowing. We argue, in particular, that artistic interventions can foster affective conditions that provide participants with an opportunity to engage with various issues, such as feelings of isolation and not-knowing, through empathic practice with and through others. In the sections that follow, we further elaborate on this theorization through an empirical study of a specific artistic intervention. Artistic intervention This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a nine-month-long artistic intervention called Becoming in Academia (2020). The intervention took place in the context of the NBS and was targeted at doctoral students. The purpose of the intervention was to create an open, noncurricular space where doctoral students could share and reflect on their experiences of working at an NBS with the help of arts-based methods. The first and fourth authors, who also work as doctoral students and have experience in arts-based methods, initiated the artistic intervention and conducted the ethnographic study. Becoming in Academia is an illuminating example of artistic intervention in a contemporary, competitive, and performance-oriented management education context. In such a context, doctoral students often face high levels of uncertainty, loneliness, self-doubt (Prasad 2016), and institutional pressures (Katila et al. 2020; Pagan 2019; Wegener, Meier, and Ingerslev 2016), encouraging them to instrumentalize their passions (Kiriakos and Tienari 2018; Lund and Tienari 2019). The working culture of the NBS deems the ‘ideal academic’as someone self-sufficient who can produce ‘worldclass’research at a fast pace, evoking various uncertainties. Instead of imposing these uncertainties, however, the Becoming in Academia intervention sought to make space for the participants’lived experiences. The intervention consisted of three phases. In the first phase, the participants were recruited through an email invitation sent to all registered doctoral students at an NBS. Those interested in participating joined an information session in which the first and fourth authors introduced themselves and explained the intervention and their interest in conducting ethnographic research. After the session, 14 doctoral students volunteered to participate in the intervention. Over the following weeks of spring 2020, the participants were interviewed in pairs. This round of interviews served as a starting point for the intervention, setting its tone and helping recognize commonalities and differences between the doctoral students’experiences. In the second phase, the first and fourth authors divided the participants into two groups (eight and six participants in each group). The groups agreed on ground rules, agreeing to be responsible for themselves and the other participants. Both groups then attended 6 working sessions separately (12 sessions in total), organized every second or third week. In the sessions, the participants came together and explored a range of themes related to their doctoral studies through facilitated artsbased exercises. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and social distancing measures, 9 out of 12 working sessions were organized as Zoom video conferences. Throughout the working sessions, confidentiality was important not only as an ethical requirement from a research perspective but also among the participants. In this paper, we use pseudonyms to protect the participants’ anonymity. In the working sessions, the participants selected and agreed on the themes they wanted to explore together (e.g. balance, managing myself, control/lack of control, anxiety, self-confidence, curiosity, my path, and uncertainty). After selecting the themes, they arranged them to create a visual map. One of the visualizations had the shape of a tree and focused on work-related 6A. PAULA LAFAIRE ET AL. uncertainty. This visualization later served as a grounding tool to start many of the working sessions. Each participant drew a mark on the visualization to indicate what specific topic they wanted to focus on. Thus, the intervention emphasized attending to what was emerging in the group and embracing the changing moods and needs. The third phase of the intervention was aimed at closing the experience. It took place in the form of hybrid interviews in small groups, with some participants attending in person and others attending video conferences. In these interviews, the participants reflected on the intervention and what it meant for them. It turned out that the encounters within the working sessions were among only a few social interactions many of the participants had during the first weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown. More broadly, this period of isolation and uncertainty increased general anxiety and a sense of unproductivity among academics (Plotnikof et al. 2020). Thus, the intervention served as a safe meeting point to talk about how they were coping with the disruption of their academic work and personal lives in a vulnerable way. The arts-based methods employed in the 6 working sessions with the 2 groups emphasized storytelling and metaphoric description. The first and fourth authors chose these methods because they have projective qualities that allow for the illustration of complex understandings (Taylor and Ladkin 2009). Further, they lend themselves well to tapping into the aesthetic and emotional quality of feeling, translating such felt experience into poetic and symbolic concepts, and making sense of the self and others in an iterative mediation between verbal and preverbal imaginative synthesis (Eisner 2008; Lakoffand Johnson 1999; Leavy 2017). In the working sessions, different activities, improvisation techniques, and props (e.g. illustrations, objects, and imaginary scenes) were further used to elicit spontaneity and creativity between the participants. Ethnographic materials and analysis The first and fourth authors used an ethnographic approach to document and study the Becoming in Academia intervention they initiated. As a research approach, ethnography requires researchers to immerse themselves in the research setting and become open and sensitive to the context, actors, and interactions taking place (Ybema et al. 2009). This means incorporating diverse methods of fieldwork and embodied knowing to understand the often-hidden aspects of organization and culture (Yanow, Ybema, and Van Hulst 2012). Hence, the ethnographic approach is neither subjective nor objective; rather, it is an interpretative act of social reality (Gaggiotti, Kostera, and Krzyworzeka 2017). Following these principles, the first and fourth authors acknowledge their own active role in both the artistic intervention and the ethnographic study of it. They were unavoidably ‘affecting and affected by’(Gherardi 2019, 754; Pink 2015; Stewart 2007) these entangled processes. Analytically, this means that their embodied situated experiences should be seen in connection with and ‘becoming-with’a multiplicity of other materialities and discourses involved, which intentionally or unintentionally affect (Gherardi 2019, 754) how things develop through the ongoing process of research. Acknowledging this favors creative methods that embrace the unknown. Hence, art and aesthetics are suitable for investigating the ‘production of knowledge in action’(Gherardi 2019, 752) and have the emancipatory potential for imagining other ways of organizing. The ethnographic data generated during the artistic intervention consisted of video and audio recordings, field notes, and documents generated while planning, facilitating, and participating in the intervention. The data also included photographs and participants’reflections during the working sessions. Altogether, the first and fourth authors conducted 12 in-depth group interviews (60–120 min each) and recorded 12 sessions, 2.5 h each (6 working sessions x 2 groups). During the intervention, the authors alternated the roles of a working session facilitator and participantobserver. The insider position as a fellow doctoral student allowed them to connect personally with the participants. This experience became a relevant data source for analyzing the embodied understanding of the empathic practice and affective relations. CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 7 We recognized the limits of how much one can know about the other (Pedwell 2012). In this sense, the epistemic practice is not for the sake of information per se but rather to relate to others’stories and one’s own through a new lens. At the end of the intervention, some participants referred to the experience as a relevant peer support group that was needed during the pandemic’s social isolation period. They expressed that this type of emotional support was not available to them through other spaces in the organization. Discussion In this paper, we have examined how artistic intervention can facilitate empathic engagement with work-related uncertainty within postgraduate management education. We theorized that empathy as a form of relational knowing emerges in an interspace that is created by artistic intervention, a space in which a multiplicity of possibilities for engaging with ideas, humans, and non-humans are exposed. Through an ethnographic study –Becoming in Academia, a nine-month artistic intervention conducted with a group of doctoral students –we highlighted three activities through which this interspace was accomplished, opening the possibility for empathic knowing of workrelated uncertainty. In aligning oneself to the other, the intervention’s participants attuned to work-related uncertainty by constructing a unifying story that brought together various experiences. In narrating a collective validation, the participants specified details of this uncertainty by narrating each other’s experiences. Finally, in acknowledging the agency of the other, the participants developed new ways of relating to work-related uncertainties by collectively affirming each other’s experiences. Our analysis demonstrates how the intervention invited or even forced the participants to distance themselves from the logico-rational knowing that is dominant in the management education context. Instead of engaging with work-related uncertainty through, for example, goal-oriented supervision practices, the participants worked with peer doctoral students through arts-based methods that highlighted playfulness and open-endedness. As we have shown above, participating in this exercise was not effortless for the participants or the facilitators. Instead, it required them to pay considerable attention to silence, tension, and moment-to-moment emotional, rhythmic, and energetic changes. It was, however, exactly these surprising, and at times uncomfortable, moments in the interspace of Becoming in Academia that gave rise to empathic knowing of work-related uncertainty. We have highlighted, for example, how narrating a collective validation emerged from a moment of silence after a participant shared her anxiety about working within the pandemic context. Overall, our analysis emphasizes how shifts in knowing related to workrelated uncertainty are connected to the effects of bringing arts-based methods into postgraduate management education by peer doctoral students. We offer two contributions to the literature on arts-based management education. First, while several studies have highlighted the potential of arts-based teaching and learning methods for enhancing collaboration and interaction among organizational members (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015; Kostera and Wozniak 2020; Steyaert, Beyes, and Parker 2016; Taylor and Ladkin 2009) relatively little attention has been paid to the activities of artistic intervention in and through which a space for empathy can be created. Through our study, we contribute to this line of scholarship by theorizing and empirically illustrating how an artistic intervention can open up an interspace (Berthoin Antal and Strauß 2015) with the possibility of enacting empathy as a particular form of knowing. Through the empirical vignettes and analysis, we illustrated how the Becoming in Academia intervention created this interspace through three main activities that, among other things, introduced a temporal order where the ‘doing’was part of the ‘ends’rather than the means. As we have highlighted, this allowed the participants to be open and vulnerable and to engage collaboratively and playfully with work-related uncertainties. Importantly, the interspace we examined enabled the participants to share their experiences without the pressure of producing a predefined outcome, measuring it, or performing in professional 14 A. PAULA LAFAIRE ET AL. academic ways. Rather than providing a particular framework for how and what to know or learn, the activities we examined contribute to the importance of open-ended knowing with multiple others (Steyaert, Beyes, and Parker 2016). For example, participating in the Becoming in Academia intervention meant different things for different participants. While some of our participants made sense of it as a process of inspiration, others saw it as a support group, an opportunity to witness others’professional development, and an anchor point during an uncertain time. Overall, the creation of an interspace space through the activities of the artistic intervention allowed the participants to both listen and be listened to in various ways that were different from those in everyday management education. Second, while existing studies have discussed arts-based methods in management education as a way to explore and reflect on the affective and embodied experience of learning (Leavy 2017; Mack 2013; Wicks and Rippin 2010), relatively little attention has been paid to the relationships between artistic intervention and work-related uncertainty (Otto and Strauß 2019). We contribute to this stream of research by showing how an artistic intervention, through the interspace it creates, can enable participants to rethink such uncertainty. This finding enriches the previous literature as it elucidates the capacity of artistic intervention to open new, yet ephemeral, possibilities for engaging with and unpacking uncertainty related to work. As we have shown above, arts-based methods such as storytelling and metaphoric description can contribute to such engagement, as they offer creative, playful approaches that can help the participants recognize both their personal and collective agency amid pressures. Our analysis further highlights that the participants expressed a strong commitment to exploring and investigating these uncertainties beyond or outside academic goaldriven practices. As expressed by our participants, this was fostered by the COVID-19 pandemic, contributing to the blurring of the distinctions between personal and work life, making even more evident the need to reconsider how uncertainty can(not) be expressed and validated within the management education context. Overall, the intervention allowed the participants to share what they would not have otherwise disclosed in the workspace. Our argument has limitations. The findings from the Becoming in Academia intervention may be specific to the rather small group of committed intervention participants, their shared condition as early career scholars, and the facilitation of the intervention by peer doctoral students. While much of the postgraduate management education highlights independent work and the development of independent thinking under a high level of uncertainty, the participants in our study committed to a nine-month intervention with a group of fellow doctoral students. They had the resources to meet with each other regularly and to develop their understanding of uncertainties related to their academic journeys together. In many other uncertain work settings, such as platform-based work where individuals typically do short-term work and where interactions with peers are limited (Moisander, Groß, and Eräranta 2018), the formation of this kind of relationship can be much more difficult. Our analysis may also be specific to the relatively small group of intervention participants (14). We believe that working with a much larger group of students, which is increasingly common in neoliberal universities that are turning into ‘edu-factories’where students are seen as costumers (Fleming 2020, 1307), would have had a significant effect on the trust and openness that emerged between the participants of our study. Finally, our findings may have been shaped by the character of the artistic intervention we studied. Instead of being another managerial wellness program that stabilized dominant power relations, the Becoming in Academia intervention was initiated by peers and colleagues who had experience with arts-based methods. This allowed for creating a space where the dominant power relations were temporarily disrupted; it was the doctoral students’voices that were raised and heard instead of those of management. Conclusion Painful paradoxes and not-knowing are part of life and participation in management education, such as business school doctoral training. To engage with the challenges they present us, scholars suggest CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 15 that it is important to increase our sensitivity to them (Bohm and Peat 2000; Dey and Steyaert 2007; Gherardi 1999) to gain a deep understanding of the complexity, power relations, and ambiguity that are characteristic of contemporary society (Kostera and Wozniak 2020). Our study highlights how an artistic intervention can help in this endeavor, as it can create an interspace in which empathic knowing of work-related uncertainties becomes possible. Within such interspace, embodied experiences of uncertainty, self-doubt, shame, fear, and guilt become knowable through care and empathy instead of rejection or silencing. Thus, our study calls for critical scholarly attention to how arts-based methods can confront the dominant ways of feeling and experiencing in competitive educational and organizational settings by making them strange or approachable in novel ways. To this end, future research can benefit by drawing from approaches used in studies of theater, including Brecht’s work on alienation. Overall, more research is needed to better understand the (im)possibilities of artistic interventions within management education contexts to unlock not-yet-actualized ways of knowing, feeling, and relating. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). ORCID Ana Paula Lafaire http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1802-2577 Ari Kuismin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4858-2260 Johanna Moisander http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4561-7154 Leni Grünbaum http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5236-973X References Ahmed, S. 2014a.“Not in the Mood.”New Formations 82 (82): 13–28. doi:10.3898/newf.82.01.2014. Ahmed, Sara. 2014b.“Not in the Mood.”New Formations 82 (82): 13–28. Ashcraft, Karen Lee. 2017.“‘Submission’to the Rule of Excellence: Ordinary Affect and Precarious Resistance in the Labor of Organization and Management Studies.”Organization 24 (1): 36–58. Ashforth, Blake E., and Ronald H. Humphrey. 1995.“Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal.”Human Relations 48 (2): 97–125. Bell, Emma, Susan Meriläinen, Scott Taylor, and Janne Tienari. 2020.“Dangerous Knowledge: The Political, Personal, and Epistemological Promise of Feminist Research in Management and Organization Studies.”International Journal of Management Reviews 22 (2): 177–192. Bell, Emma, and Sheena J. Vachhani. 2020.“Relational Encounters and Vital Materiality in the Practice of Craft Work.” Organization Studies 41 (5): 681–701. Berthoin Antal, Ariane 2014.“When Arts Enter Organizational Spaces: Implications for Organizational Learning.”In Learning Organizations. Knowledge and Space (Klaus Tschira Symposia), edited by A. Berthoin Antal, P. Meusburger, L. Suarsana, Vol 6. Dordrecht: Springer. Berthoin Antal, Ariane. 2019.“Research on Artistic Interventions: A Learning Opportunity for Museums.”In Art/Nature. Art/Nature. Interventions at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, edited by Anita Hermannstädter, 44–49. Berlin: Edition Braus. Berthoin Antal, Ariane, and Anke Strauß. 2013.“Artistic Interventions in Organisations: Finding Evidence of Valuesadded. Review of.”Creative Clash Report, WZB. Berthoin Antal, Ariane, and Anke Strauß. 2014.“Not Only Art’s Task—Narrating Bridges Between Unusual Experiences with art and Organizational Identity.”Review of. Scandinavian Journal of Management 30 (1): 114–123. Berthoin Antal, Ariane, and Anke Strauß. 2015.“Multistakeholder perspectives on searching for evidence of valuesadded in artistic interventions in organizations.”In Artistic interventions in organizations: Research, theory and practice, edited by Ulla Johansson Sköldberg, Jill Woodilla and Ariane Berthoin Antal, 37-60. London: Routledge. Berthoin Antal, Ariane, Steven S Taylor, and Donna Ladkin. 2014.“Arts-based Interventions and Organizational Development.”Review of. The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization:261. Beyes, Timon, and Chris Steyaert. 2021.“Unsettling Bodies of Knowledge: Walking as a Pedagogy of Affect.” Management Learning 52 (2): 224–242. Bohm, David, and F. David Peat. 2000.Science, Order, and creativity. London: Psychology Press. 16 A. PAULA LAFAIRE ET AL. Brecht, B. 1976.“On Everyday Theatre.”In Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956, edited by J. Willett and R. Manheim, 176–179. London: Eyre Methuen. Bristow, Alexandra, Sarah Robinson, and Olivier Ratle. 2017.“Being an Early-Career CMS Academic in the Context of Insecurity and ‘Excellence’: The Dialectics of Resistance and Compliance.”Organization Studies 38 (9): 1185–1207. Brook, Peter. 1996.The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough. immediate: Simon and Schuster. Campelia, Georgina D. 2017.“Empathic Knowledge: The Import of Empathy’s Social Epistemology.”Social Epistemology 31 (6): 530–544. Chemi, Tatiana, and Xiangyun Du. 2017.Arts-based Methods and Organizational Learning: Higher Education Around the World. Cham: Springer. Coplan, A. 2014.“Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects.”In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by A. Coplan and P. Goldie, 3–18. New York: Oxford University Press. Darsø, Lotte. 2016.“Arts-in-business from 2004 to 2014: From Experiments in Practice to Research and Leadership Development.”In Artistic Interventions in Organizations: Research, Theory and Practice, edited by Ulla Johansson Sköldberg, Jill Woodilla, and Ariane Berthoin Antal, 18–34. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2001.“A Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida.”Derrida Downunder, translated by Peggy Kamuf, edited by Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth, 249–63. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press Limited. Dey, Pascal, and Chris Steyaert. 2007.“The Troubadours of Knowledge: Passion and Invention in Management Education.”Organization 14 (3): 437–461. Eisner, Elliot. 2008.“Art and Knowledge.”In Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, edited by J. Gary Knowles, and Ardra L. Cole, 3–12. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Fleming, Peter. 2020.“Dark Academia: Despair in the Neoliberal Business School. Journal of Management Studies 57 (6):1305-1311. Fotaki, Marianna, Kate Kenny, and Sheena J Vachhani. 2017.“Thinking Critically About Affect in Organization Studies: Why it Matters.”Organization 24 (1): 3–17. Gaggiotti, Hugo, Monika Kostera, and PawełKrzyworzeka. 2017.“More Than a Method? Organisational Ethnography as a way of Imagining the Social.”Culture and Organization 23 (5): 325–340. Gherardi, Silvia. 1999.“Learning as Problem-Driven or Learning in the Face of Mystery?.”Organization Studies 20 (1): 101–123. Gherardi, Silvia. 2019.“Theorizing Affective Ethnography for Organization Studies.”Organization 26 (6): 741–760. Hoffman, M. L. 2000.Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. New York: Cambridge University Press. hooks, Bell. 1991.“Theory as Liberatory Practice.”Review of. Yale JL & Feminism 4: 1. Katila, Saija, Ari Kuismin, and Anu Valtonen. 2020.“Becoming Upbeat: Learning the Affecto-Rhythmic Order of Organizational Practices.”Human Relations 73 (9): 1308–1330. Katila, S., M. Laamanen, M. Laihonen, R. Lund, S. Meriläinen, J. Rinkinen, and J. Tienari. 2020. "Becoming Academics: Embracing and Resisting Changing Writing Practice." Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management 15 (3): 315–330. doi:10.1108/QROM-12-2018-1713. King, Steve H., Jr. 2011.“The Structure of Empathy in Social Work Practice.”Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 21 (6): 679-695. doi:10.1080/10911359.2011.583516. Kiriakos, Carol Marie, and Janne Tienari. 2018.“Academic Writing as Love.”Management Learning 49 (3): 263–277. Kostera, Monika, and Cezary Wozniak. 2020.Aesthetics, Organization, and Humanistic Management. London: Routledge. Ladkin, Donna, and Steven S. Taylor. 2010.“Leadership as art: Variations on a Theme.”Leadership 6 (3): 235–241. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999.Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Vol. 640. New York: Basic Books. Leavy, Patricia. 2017.Handbook of Arts-Based Research. New York, USA: Guilford Publications. Linstead, Stephen, and Heather Joy Höpfl.2000.The aesthetics of organization. London: Sage. Lund, Rebecca, and Janne Tienari. 2019.“Passion, Care, and Eros in the Gendered Neoliberal University.”Organization 26 (1): 98–121. Mack, Kathy. 2013.“Taking an Aesthetic Risk in Management Education: Reflections on an Artistic-Aesthetic Approach.” Management Learning 44 (3): 286–304. Meriläinen, Susan, Tarja Salmela, and Anu Valtonen. 2021.“Vulnerable Relational Knowing That Matters.”Review of. Gender, Work & Organization 29 (1): 79–91. Moisander, Johanna, Claudia Groß, and Kirsi Eräranta. 2018.“Mechanisms of Biopower and Neoliberal Governmentality in Precarious Work: Mobilizing the Dependent Self-Employed as Independent Business Owners.”Human Relations 71 (3): 375–398. Moisander, Johanna, and Sari Stenfors. 2009.“Exploring the Edges of Theory-Practice Gap: Epistemic Cultures in Strategy-Tool Development and Use.”Organization 16 (2): 227–247. Moriceau, Jean-Luc, and Terrence Letiche. 2018.“Art of/for studying work.”In. Nissley, Nick. 2010.“Arts-Based Learning at Work: Economic Downturns, Innovation Upturns, and the Eminent Practicality of Arts in Business.”Journal of Business Strategy 31 (4): 8–20. CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 17 Otto, Birke Dorothea, and Anke Strauß. 2019.“The Novel as Affective Site: Uncertain Work as Impasse inWait Until Spring, Bandini.”Organization Studies 40 (12): 1805–1822. Pagan, Victoria. 2019.“Being and Becoming a “Good”Qualitative Researcher? Liminality and the Risk of Limbo.” Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal 14 (1): 75–90. Pedwell, Carolyn. 2012.“Affective (Self-) Transformations: Empathy, Neoliberalism and International Development.” Feminist Theory 13 (2): 163–179. Pink, S. 2015.Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Plotnikof, Mie, Pia Bramming, Layla Branicki, Lærke Højgaard Christiansen, Kelly Henley, Nina Kivinen, Catching a Glimpse: Corona-Life and its Micro-Politics in Academia, Gender, Work & Organization. 2020.“Catching a glimpse: Corona-life and its micro-politics in academia.”Review of. Gender, Work & Organization 27 (5):804-826. Prasad, Ajnesh. 2016.Contesting Institutional Hegemony in Today’s Business Schools. Doctoral students speak out: Emerald Group Publishing. Sköldberg, Ulla Johansson, Jill Woodilla, and Ariane Berthoin Antal. 2015.Artistic Interventions in Organizations: Research, theory and practice: Routledge. Slote, Michael. 2016.From Enlightenment to Receptivity. Rethinking our values: Oxford University Press. Springborg, Claus. 2010.“Leadership as art - Leaders Coming to Their Senses.”Leadership 6 (3): 243–258. Springborg, Claus. 2012.“Perceptual Refinement: Art-Based Methods in Managerial Education.”Review of. Organizational Aesthetics 1 (1): 116–137. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007.Ordinary affects:Duke University Press. Steyaert, Chris, Timon Beyes, and Martin Parker. 2016.The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education. London: Routledge. Steyaert, Chris, Patrizia Hoyer, and Bernhard Resch. 2016. "Playing and the Performing Arts: Six Memos for the Future Classroom." In The Routledge Companion to Reinventing Management Education, edited bu Chris Steyaert, Timon Beyes, and Martin Parker, 358–374. London: Routledge. Strati, Antonio. 2007.“Sensible Knowledge and Practice-Based Learning.”Management Learning 38 (1): 61–77. Taylor, Steven S., and Donna Ladkin. 2009.“Understanding Arts-Based Methods in Managerial Development.”Academy of Management Learning & Education 8 (1): 55–69. van den Akker, José. 2014.“Art-based Learning: Painting the Journey of Self-Realisation.”Reflective Practice 15 (6): 751– 765. Van Maanen, John, Jesper B Sørensen, and Terence R Mitchell. 2007.“The Interplay Between Theory and Method.” Academy of Management Review 32 (4): 1145–1154. Wegener, Charlotte, Ninna Meier, and Karen Ingerslev. 2016.“Borrowing Brainpower –Sharing Insecurities. Lessons Learned from a Doctoral Peer Writing Group.”Studies in Higher Education 41 (6): 1092–1105. Weick, Karl E. 2007.“Drop Your Tools: On Reconfiguring Management Education.”Journal of Management Education 31 (1): 5–16. Wicks, Patricia Gayá, and Ann Rippin. 2010.“Art as Experience: An Inquiry Into art and Leadership Using Dolls and Doll- Making.”Leadership 6 (3): 259–278. Yanow, D., S. B. Ybema, and M. van Hulst. 2012. "Practising Organizational Ethnography." In Qualitative Organizational Research: Core Methods and Current Challenges, 331–350. Sage. Ybema, Sierk, Dvora Yanow, Harry Wels, and Frans H Kamsteeg. 2009.Organizational Ethnography: Studying the Complexity of Everyday Life. London: Sage. 18 A. PAULA LAFAIRE ET AL.