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- Convenors:
-
Katharina Schramm
(University of Bayreuth)
Amiel Bize (Cornell University)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores research collaboration as an epistemological, political, ethical, and methodological question. We envision it as a hopeful investigation of collaboration, but one that does not shy away from thinking through its difficulties.
Long Abstract:
If research is meant to make a difference in the world, collaboration is key. To this end, research collaborations may range from very pragmatic to highly idealistic projects. Yet even the most carefully designed collaborations are not free of power relations, unpredictable dynamics, and divergent stakes. Collaboration entails constant work: both to enact and to rigorously and critically evaluate. This panel explores research collaboration as an epistemological, political, ethical, and methodological question. We envision it as a hopeful investigation of collaboration, but one that does not shy away from thinking through its difficulties.
To propose collaboration—particularly when it aims to reimagine conventional roles like “researcher,” “community member,” “stakeholder,” etc—is also to claim the possibility of research as a shared space of inquiry and action. We are drawn to the strong critiques of social science research emerging from Indigenous and environmental justice movements, among others, which have brought important attention to "relational accountability" (Wilson 2008) and proposed methodological and practical interventions that include various forms of citizen science (Liboiron 2021), “desire-centered” (Tuck 2009), and community “useful” research (Tuhiwai Smith 1999).
These frameworks urge us to confront the epistemological questions raised by research across difference, alongside the material and representational inequalities that continue to feature in many research settings. How do we foreground and navigate the political goals and demands that collaborative research can make possible, perhaps even when these are not fully shared? What work needs to be done to prepare for and adjust collaboration, and what do we do when collaborations don’t go well? Who actually bears the burden of collaboration’s labor? And how do we ensure that collaborations don’t exacerbate extractivist research logics?
We invite contributions in a variety of formats (including academic presentation, film, dialogue, exercises, etc) that consider collaboration in all its complexity.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Leonie Dronkert (University of Amsterdam)
Short abstract:
This multimodal article shows how my research partner Olof and I "cripped" collaboration by making the science-fiction film “O" together. Moving away from the ideal of inclusion, this project made us arrive at a more relational and interdependent understanding of collaboration and of access.
Long abstract:
Inclusive participatory approaches strive to collaborate with participants with mild intellectual disabilities (MID) by making them co-researchers. However, academic standards of knowledge production and the need for cognitive and linguistic skills can complicate these collaborations. I argue that collaboration with people with disabilities is not about efforts of inclusion, but instead, it is our methodologies that need to be “cripped.” This means moving away from the ideal of inclusion, toward a more interdependent and relational understanding of access and collaboration. This multimodal article shows how my research partner Olof and I explored this way of working together by describing the coproduction of the science-fiction film “O.”
Andrea Behrends (Leipzig University) Remadji Hoinathy
Short abstract:
With our collaboration reaching back more than fifteen years, we intend to engage into a dialogue about the decolonization paradigm and practices of collaboration based on our personal experiences and a focus on how to deal with academic inequalities.
Long abstract:
Contextual constraints to research in Chad are manifold. To engage young anthropologists into research activities, the Centre de Recherche on Anthropologie et Sciences Humaines (CRASH) takes up consultancy research from various origins. “Applied research” has long encountered a lack of appreciation mainly in academic institutions in the Global North. We maintain that this lack strongly connects to colonially based forms of knowledge production and dissemination that need to be revisited. Decolonizing means looking at all aspects of academic knowledge production and use, such as funding, data collection, analysis, writing and publishing findings. It is common knowledge that even if individual research collaboration is as symmetrical as possible the actual configurations around social science are not. In this dialogue we want to look at the experiences in various collaborations and their structural backgrounds. Starting from Dipesh Chkrabaty’s (2000) claim to provincialize Europe, we follow Law’s and Lin’s (2017) suggestion to engage in a “lively, two-way, and contested” form of “traffic” between research locations, in order to maintain a “postcolonial version of the principal of asymmetry” (ibid: 4). We will discuss whose priorities count and what the “pretty matter-of-fact institutional practicalities” (ibid: 7) should look like to make (Chadian) anthropology be heard. What are the possibilities of defining an anthropology that covers matters of concern within the Chadian context by, at the same time, aligning with international science fora? It includes destigmatizing the combination of consultancy (‘applied’ research) and academia (considered to be ‘fundamental’ research), to advance young scholars options and possibilities.
Tamara Mulherin (Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University) Sebastian Prost (Northumbria University) Rob Wilson (Northumbria University)
Short abstract:
Despite a relational ethos of ‘power-with’ we discuss the effects of collaborative inertia in a University-Community Sector research partnership in Northeast England. We show the paradox entailed in normative expectations and the labour entailed as boundary spanning university researchers.
Long abstract:
Conceptually, partnership has ubiquitous, normative appeal, yet, the craft of collaboration is demanding, and can exhibit unequal power effects. Throughout 2023, as university researchers, we’ve been ‘collaborating’ with community organisations in Northeast England to build a community research partnership. The aim is to generate capabilities, co-develop research with communities, and improve accessibility of university knowledge and resources. We work in marginal university research endeavours, navigating differential power relations both within the university, and the small community-based organisations we are working with. We describe ourselves as boundary spanners, managing without formal power between partner organisations, but wanting to establish equitable, durable institutional relations, and reduce dependency on individuals’ efforts and precarious positions.
This paper outlines our efforts in an intensively participative, but in what has felt like, unproductive process, as we grapple to make sense of what is appropriate to do next. Despite our relational sensibility, the time involved, mistakes, learning, and challenges remain ongoing predicaments. Furthermore, our attempts to build bespoke relations have highlighted “the university” as opaque and convoluted, where managerial practices clash with claims to equity. The university's business model readily seeks partnership with other corporate actors, while community organisations remain overlooked. Our approach also does not fit well with extractive, impact-seeking research infrastructure. Finally, while the new university strategy invokes ‘world-leading’ research and employable students, it disregards its role with local communities. This context obscures the processual features of collaborating, and the disarray that can occur. Clearly ‘working together’, while easy to espouse and recommend, is arduous.
Puneet Jain (Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK))
Short abstract:
This proposal dwells on a VR/AR artistic work, “Crip Sensorama”, developed in close collaboration with people with disabilities to reflect on, unlearn, and reveal ableist biases in my own HCI practice as a non-disabled artist/researcher - flipping power dynamics through 'criptastic hacking'.
Long abstract:
This proposal critically reflects on a recent close co-collaboration and experience of working as a non-disabled Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher/artist with my two collaborators Eric Desrosiers and Christian Bayerlein (who are quadriplegic and identify themselves as disabled artists) for a VR/AR artwork exhibited as a part of FOUNDING LAB program at IT:U and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Through this proposal, we aim to share the experience of adopting the approach of ‘criptastic hacking’ (Yergeau, 2014) from disability studies to hack, modify, and reverse the technologies during the creation of the art-work – adapting the VR/AR technologies for bodies of Christian and Eric. Criptastic hacking as a methodological approach critiques technoableism (Shew, 2023) and instead harnesses and draws on the long history of hacking and tinkering performed by disabled people to navigate in an inaccessible world. Concretely, this work exposes how collaborations between different bodily embodiments and technologies can playfully shift power dynamics and recast “relational aesthetics” (Bourriaud 2002), among artists/researchers/engineers working on a common goal. Moreover, asking how such a contrasting approach of criptastic hacking (uncommon in HCI) and collaboration challenges the pre-dominant methodologies/practices in the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction – where disability is often treated as a “problem” assumed to be easily solved and eradicated using “assistive” technologies.
Vasundhara Bhojvaid (Shiv Nadar University)
Long abstract:
This presentation is a result of how our individual anthropological research on air pollution and climate change in India and environmental and political aspects of sheep farming and industrial wool production in Patagonia, made us think through each others work about the manifestations of airy materials as pollution in Delhi, India and wind in Patagonia, respectively. Through these engagements we offer a way to think about asymmetrical attunements to two remote versions of air that remain incommensurable and yet co-exist in a dynamic planetary atmosphere.
We believe that our presentation presents new ways to anthropologically explore the contemporary world by focusing on air and its divergent manifestations that impact the local socio-political lives of people in two parts of the world. Significantly, this is based on our ability to think through each other's work to understand the specificities of our individual field sites and how anthropologists can collaborate and learn from each other's work through varied manifestations of air.
Jelena Kupsjak (University of Zadar) Ljiljana Pantovic (Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade)
Long abstract:
This paper critically examines the concept of collaboration through research experiences in the project "In the Frictions of Social(ised) Medicine: A Collaborative Ethnography of Public Health Institutions in Croatia and Serbia," funded by SeeFField at the University of Regensburg. Currently ongoing, the research aims to establish "epistemic partnerships" (Marcus) with public health professionals in Croatia and Serbia, laying the groundwork to expand the study into social(ised) medicine in other ex-Yugoslav countries and beyond professional communities.
Recent decades have witnessed significant shifts in public health systems in Croatia and Serbia, introducing neoliberal reforms and logics that replaced the previous socialised approach (social self-management) based on the principles of social medicine, a unique version of Yugoslav social medicine. Through the project, we explore the boundaries for collaborative research, seeking a better understanding of the role of social medicine and the frictions arising from translational work during this transition.
During this presentation, we will delve into our own partnership as researchers, reflecting on how our gender and ethnic identities, along with institutional and disciplinary hierarchies and responsibilities, shape the ways in which we pose questions, build relationships and partnerships, and conduct our fieldwork.
Sofia Hnezla (University of St. Andrews)
Long abstract:
In the course of my doctoral research on Tunisians’ experiences of social, political, and economic confinement since 1956, I decided to undertake the challenge of researching and writing collaboratively, to address a gap in the existing literature. Consequently, I chose stories and life trajectories as the main focus for this research. The research experiments with different styles of writing, and coming together, within a strategy of “comparing notes”. These methodologies are reflected in “encounters”, as opposed to formal interviews, whereby my research participants and I partook in communal activities (cooking, cleaning, eating, walking…) and I consciously shared my own experiences and opened the discussion for comparison as well as empathy. Together we undertook the experiment of co-writing, which involved sending the participants texts (or “scenes”) revealing my own experiences of socio-political and economic confinement and prompting a response. Consequently, we initiated a flow of writing, sharing and “comparing notes” that continues even now that I am out of the “field.” The paper thus tackles the following question: How can “comparing notes” and collaborative research articulate possibilities of writing otherwise or counter-writing?
Amiel Bize (Cornell University) Katharina Schramm (University of Bayreuth)
Long abstract:
We will present a dialogue between an anthropologist of postcolonial STS and an economic anthropologist thinking together about the conditions, stakes, and complexities of collaboration. While attending to questions of collaboration more broadly, we focus in particular on collaboration between academics and community co-researchers. We will talk through examples from our past and planned future research, thinking them through in relation to existing theorizations of collaboration and community engagement. How, for instance, does one support the political goals of research collaborators and navigate political demands? What might community collaboration look like when the research object is something at the scale of global finance? What work needs to be done to prepare for and adjust collaboration? And how do we ensure that collaborations don’t exacerbate extractivist research logics?