How do we dwell tenderly in the ruins of the modern university? This paper engages a hopeful, collaborative, and sensory methodology to imagine possibilities for research and researcher. As academic women navigating the decay of the neoliberal university amid the shadowy spectre of the 'ideal' academic, we explore our lived experiences, identities, and questions. For us, managing modernity's disorientation and dislocation means showing up differently, with new tools, new theoretical frames, and new ways of relating. From our experiential and aesthetic inquiry, tendrils of possibility for what research does, has been, is, and could be, are emerging. Our dwelling together (co-sensing in radical tenderness) helps us see beyond the thicket of institutional requirements towards a more hopeful and collective existence -- for if the sense of separation instilled by modernity is a social disease, healing must be a communal endeavour.