Paper short abstract

This paper shifts studies of collaboration from a bureaucratic focus on practices, and, drawing on feminist theory, re-thinks collaboration as a kind of inter-species relation; living a collaborative life, I argue, thus means learning to bear the conjoined intimacy and negativity of living-together.

Paper long abstract

There has been much attention to the politics and pragmatics of interdisciplinary collaboration lately, and especially to the shifting topoi of collaboration between social scientists and life scientists- with some even proposing a 'collaborative turn' in STS, medical anthropology and sociology, and allied practices. This development (desired or otherwise) has a complex and varied genealogy: it is associated with a postgenomic turn to social and environmental life within some parts of the biological sciences; but also with a bureaucratic shift away from disciplines in the structures of university and research management.

This development has produced a range of empirical accounts of collaboration (Viseu, 2015; Balmer et al, 2015; Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015). In this paper, I build on these stories. But I also move beyond a tendency, in this genre, towards lamentation, and a general interest in tactics for improved relation. Drawing on contemporary feminist theory (Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Wilson, and Sara Ahmed), I theorize collaboration as neither an apparatus nor a practice, but as a form of life, and as an inter-species relation. I argue that that this displaces the image of collaboration as a machine in need of fixing, and fixes attention, instead, on the conjoined intimacy and negativity of living-together. Living a collaborative life, I argue, is not about making better practices, but of taking seriously the ethics of shared living - of understanding how that living becomes bearable, when it is so endlessly structured by inseparable relations of joy, frustration, envy, excitement, and annoyance.