Reimagining Contested Communities: Collaboration as an Act of Hope in an Age of Post-Truth

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

Abstract

Objectives
This paper describes the process of writing a co-authored book about a community in the UK that had experienced racism and a trauma connected to media representation. Drawing on the work of Lassiter (2005) and Author 1 and 2 this presentation will describe the process of collaboratively writing that book.

Perspectives and theoretical framework
We worked with the idea of utopia as method (Levitas 2013), drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch to create a space to think differently. Bloch (1986) offers a way of thinking of hope as both an entity and a process: “[H]ope ... dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy” (p. 341). In co-production, we enact a utopian hope that people can productively engage with difference, that they can work with and across difference. We also worked with ideas from Mouffe (2007) and Ranciere (2010) about the importance of difference and diversity in collaborative research.

Methods and data sources
Our work was rooted in a collaborative approach to research, (Author 1 and 2). We drew on a tradition of creating multi-situated, rhizomatic, and reciprocal partnerships that rise, shift and transform in response to emerging and pressing contemporary problems. These partnerships explicitly seek to positively affect those problems, presume meaningful agency of participants, and are grounded in the coproduction of knowledge. We found work on collaborative research knowledge production practices particularly helpful (Rasool 2017, Author 1 and 2, Tuwihai Smith, Tuck and Wang 2018).

Results
Collaborative theories and methodologies are rooted in the idea that people from across locations, situations, and positions possess different and valuable perspectives, knowledge, and expertise. Collaborating across those differences leads to different ways of knowing and being. Those different ways of knowing and being, we believe, are required for addressing the myriad divisions and challenges that seem to characterize this world in a post-truth era.

Significance
When we began this collaborative research project in 2013, we did not anticipate the world our book would be born into. We seem caught in deepening divisions, and there is more urgency to this work now than when we started. It is becoming clear that we must all, in whatever ways we can, do the work of first imagining, then creating the societies we seek. For us, that has meant doing collaborative research, in which we explicitly and deliberately work with and across our differences without eschewing them, and through which we break free of the echo chambers in which so many of us live and work. Collaborating with those who think, act, and believe differently compels those who participate to also think, act, and believe differently.

Authors

• Elizabeth Campbell, Appalachian State University

• Kate Heron Pahl, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Elizabeth Pente

• Zanib Rasool