"Who Has Ever Written a Book Before, Raise Your Hand": Navigating Co-Authorship Across Difference

• In Event: 64.089 - Sheraton Roundtable 12 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 64.089-10 - Writing Co-Production: Thinking, Feeling, and Knowing Together

Abstract

Objective: Drawing on our experiences working together as co-researchers, co-authors, and co-implementers in a long-term participatory ethnography, this paper describes how we brought together two very different discourse communities - academic researchers and community organizers - to produce a book. Using data from over ten years of collaboration, we illustrate the progression, over time and through various iterations, of our movement toward increasingly relational practices, implicating the personal vulnerability, intimacy, and trust needed to write collaboratively.

Theory & Inquiry Practices: We used the concepts of dialogicality and literacy as social practice (Bakhtin, 1981; Kinloch, 2005; 2009; Author 1; Marková, 2003; Rommetveit, 1991); the rhizomatic structure of interdependence and generativity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Leander & Boldt, 2013; Leander & Rowe, 2006), and dissensus (Ziarek, 2001) as an ethical political model in our analysis. This framework required that we address difference and otherness while being open to what we do not understand, what we are not familiar with—and at times, what we do not agree with. It is a different way of speaking and listening—crossing normative and discursive boundaries to make visible epistemological inequities (Fricker, 2007). Co-authorship revealed tacit assumptions that the “knowledge” produced by the research would be validated by academic paradigms and institutions, not by the community in which the research was conducted.

Insights & Significance: The tensions between the scholarly approach of the university and the lived-experience approach of the community researchers surfaced early. Even though the university researchers took pride in understanding engagement and activist research, generative frictions between the two approaches demanded that we examine these differences and what they meant. We came to understand that the university people wrote for a living and shared similar writing practices, such as brainstorming, creating outlines, sharing multiple drafts, and using track changes to revise. Community members communicated differently. They preferred to think together out loud, draw, read, and talk—practices that reflected their view of themselves as collaborative writers who have a shared history. After a few false starts, we hit on a process that worked for everyone. We created a shared Google folder where drafts were located. We met weekly to talk things through and different people wrote down what others said. White boards were key in this process. As we talked, different people would rush up to the board to write something, draw lines between things, or to make exclamation points. Figure 1 is an example of one of these boards.

Part of working for epistemological justice is reconsidering what counts as evidence. The
best intentioned researchers often fail at participatory interventions because they fail to do their “rhetorical homework” (Flower, 2008, p. 88). That is, they fail to find out what community members think and feel about policies, programs—and, importantly, university interventions—often rooted in complicated histories that are not immediately visible. Genuine conversation, with all its attendant dialogicality, agonism, and unpredictability, is method and it is how we wrote collaboratively.

Authors

• Joanne C. Larson, University of Rochester

• George H. Moses, North East Area Development, Inc./NEAD