An Emergent International Invisible College: A Guest Editor Team

• In Event: Invisible Colleges: Small Group Spaces for Growth, Inquiry, Healing, and Repair

Abstract

Background: This diverse group of “loose-knit but interconnecting” (Zuccala, 2006) editors were a white male Dean from a border state, an African American Holmes Scholar (Ph.D. student) from Florida, a Latina professor from Portugal, an associate professor from the Indian sub-continent, and a white dual-citizen female who was the co-editor of the featured journal. While jointly authoring the editorial, the Dean, the lead guest editor, suggested that the term invisible college be introduced because the concept instantiated how the shared co-editorship unfurled.
Purpose: This paper unpacks the inner workings of an invisible college, an emergent transnational one that went unrecognized until a jointly-authored editorial was written.
Perspective: Three concepts formed the study’s theoretical base: 1) metaphors in thinking and action; 2) the history of invisible colleges; and 3) knowledge communities. Bateson (1994) asserted that humans ``think with metaphors and talk with stories.” An invisible college is a powerful example of a metaphor that created a specific reality and produced guidelines for future action (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The history of invisible colleges traces to the 1700s and the Royal Society (Tarrant et al., 2018). Like-minded scientists met face-to-face and in-between. However, these small extra-institutional research groups were not visible or identifiable to others (Mulkay et al., 1975). Invisible colleges sidestep power relations and hierarchies of their formal institutions and their members put their shared research commitment above all else. These characteristics make these knowledge communities (Author11, 1995), “safe places' ' in which members story and restory their unfolding sense of knowing. These communities naturally form and disband according to members’ needs.
Methods: Narrative inquiry, the study of human experience in context, is the most suitable research method to elucidate the emergence of this invisible college. Dewey’s (1938) qualities of experience (temporality, sociality, place) assist in broadening, burrowing and storying-restorying, its interpretative tools (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).
Findings: This study’s findings show that, consistent with knowledge communities, this invisible college of editors had an originating event (Author11, 2007). Also, common writing experiences helped the international group to maintain its momentum. Importantly, the invisible college metaphor gave heightened meaning and purpose to the editorial writing. While the shared endeavor created strong research-intensive scholarship as an outcome, it did much more than that in terms of generating understanding of how collaborative processes play out among faculty from different institutions while also serving as a supportive, grounded space for those navigating destabilizing situations. The experiences of the researchers especially highlighted the potential for transnational invisible colleges to create virtual places that foster “deep belonging” (Dyson, 2024) among diverse groups of academics honoring a shared research space. They are welcome respites to the “dead spaces” (Dewey, 1938) that typically mark professors’ institutional lives.
Significance: How to move past managerialism and high stakes accountability—the hallmarks of neoliberalism (Mockler, 2012; Zuboff, 2019), which diminish educators’ humanity and professionalism (Author20, 2023; Author20 & Author11, 2023) and “bleeds them dry” (research participant), is the clarion call that this international invisible college study sounds for health and healing.

Authors

• James Gerard O'Meara, Texas A&M International University

• Maria A. Flores, University of Minho

• Meher Rizvi, Aga Khan University

• John Samuels, Kennesaw State University

• Cheryl J. Craig, Texas A&M University