Paper short abstract:

Studying the co-production of literary texts in creative writing workshops by and for migrant/plurilingual authors, we investigate collaborative writing as an emic practice, as an ethical and methodological component of our ethnography, and as an aspect of our work in an interdisciplinary team.

Paper long abstract:

Dismantling myths representing both ethnography and literary writing as solitary endeavors, anthropologists and literary scholars are paying increased attention to the ways in which writing is a collaborative process. While anthropologists question the ways in which we co-create knowledge and writings with ethnographic interlocutors, literary and translation studies scholars explore how literature is inherently polyphonic. Our research mobilizes both perspectives in studying the collaborative production of literary texts in community creative writing workshops for and by authors with migrant or plurilingual backgrounds in Europe. In this context, we aim to visibilize the processes and power dynamics of collaboration infusing writing at three levels. First, we consider collaborative writing as an object of study, being a practice utilized within the organizations we are researching. Second, we examine collaborative writing as an ethical and methodological component of our ethnography, as outsiders to the communities involved. Thirdly, we situate collaborative writing as a practice we employ in our interdisciplinary research team, taking an autoethnographic approach to studying our academic milieu. At each of these levels, we explore the power inequalities at play but also the possibilities for forming solidarities based on converging or diverging interests, political aims, and life trajectories (our languages, mobilities, work, trans-nationalities). We engage with questions of accountability to the migrant and literary communities with whom we work as well as to our academic colleagues, and grapple with how to establish modes of reciprocity that foreground the desires of our interlocutors rather than our own desire to “give back.”