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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.

There is growing recognition that transformation of healthcare systems towards health and well-being systems requires a continuous learning process. This explorative study aims to gain insight into the experiences with and investment in these learning processes within regional partnerships for health and in what they need to enhance their learning capacity to use the learning for transformation.

17 interviews were held with programme managers, data scientists, trusted advisors and a citizen representative, all involved in the learning process on a regional level in ten Dutch regional partnerships. The interviews were inductively and thematically analysed, focusing on the experiences and perceptions underlying the learning processes.

Regional partnerships invest in learning processes by organizing interactions between different groups of stakeholders and by reflecting on specific themes or on a region-wide level. Difficulty was found in region-wide reflection and in enhancing the learning capacity within the partnerships. Further enhancing the learning capacity required: (1) Investment in (the use of) expertise for translating learning outcomes into concrete action; (2) Leadership for change, underpinned by a shared sense of urgency to learn for transformation and (3) A facilitative environment for change which is both based on facilitative system structures and a basis of trust and commitment to learn and adapt.

The study highlighted the difficulty of learning on a region-wide level and the struggle to apply this learning for transformation. It provides insights into how learning processes and learning capacity can be further improved.