Assembling Partnerships and Methodologies

• In Event: Lone Scholar as “Not Enough”: The (Im)possibility of Authorship in Postmodern Research

Abstract

Purpose
We begin with the belief that we are never the sole authors of our work, although we accept that sole authorship is valued and rewarded in the academy. Believing that learning is a social act, we have to some extent given up the idea that we act alone as authors of our actions, including our own research. Shared authorship and collaborative writing partnerships exist throughout the academy but are not referenced in significant ways in the methodology sections of research reports. Usually these relationships are relegated to the acknowledgement and notes sections of dissertations and articles. As junior scholars, we do not intend to be casualties of Hood’s (1985) lone scholar myth. In our work composing dissertations together, a considerable amount of theorizing, composing, and thinking has been done jointly. For us, our purpose is to show how working together has become an issue of methodology rather than authorship.

Theoretical Framework
Writing is much more than getting thoughts down on a page—we come from the Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) school of writing as a method of inquiry and analysis. Describing our work together best fits Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) concept assemblage because it resists the binary, static nature of something belonging to or originating from either author. Our partnership does not simply involve proofreading one another’s work; instead, we use our shared theoretical and practical interests in teaching to become an assemblage. Bogue (2003) described assemblage as “collections of heterogeneous actions and entities that somehow function together” (p. 98). We have “functioned together” through dissertations, thoughts, concepts, connections, and questions, so simply calling us writing partners is too reductive. At any moment and at any place—over email, text, phone, and voicemail; at drive-thru windows; and in transit—we are a composing assemblage that can spring to life. The fertile assemblaging of writing, talking, reading, and thinking together is not double-checking our work but doing our work.

Questions that Framed Our Inquiry
Like Foucault’s (1979/1984) description of writing, our partnership “unfold[s] like a game (jeu) that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits” (p. 102). With this exciting, open, transgressive, almost playful, approach to writing, how did our partnership open up traditional conceptions of research methodology? How did working as composing partners function in the data analysis as well as the writing stages of research?

Significance
In short, our composing partnership was and is not simply a way to analyze and synthesize data or theories; it continues to be a relationship that produces, creates, and connects theory throughout, not just our scholarship but our lives. Together we work as a theory machine—a tool box—by living what Foucault and Deleuze (1972) asserted about theory, that it “does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice” (p. 5). In other words, we don’t work together to apply theory to our data, our work together uses theory to think, to write, and to live differently—all at the same time.

Authors

• Sharon Murphy Augustine, Mercer University

• Amy Davis Sanford, University of Georgia