Troubling the Single-Authored Dissertation

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

Abstract

Purpose
Writing a dissertation serves as a demonstration that a doctoral student can conduct an independent, original, significant extended research study within her field. However, working in collaborative writing relationships complicates the single-authored dissertation, particularly in postmodern research in which writing is used as a method of inquiry. In this presentation, the authors demonstrate how working with a writing partner produced unanticipated data that changed the direction of the research itself. These changes created methodological questions not only about what counted as data, data collection, and data analysis, but also how to categorize these writing partners given that, despite their influence, they cannot be listed as authors on the dissertation.

Theoretical Framework
Situating this work and ourselves as authors of dissertations within a context that foregrounds uncertainty creates the author as an unstable subject position. Foucault (1969/1977) explained that one aspect of the “author-function” “is that it is not formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It results from a complex operation whose purpose is to construct the rational entity we call an author” (p. 127). Therefore, it is more useful to think of the author as one possible option for attribution of a text rather than the single way to determine ownership of thought.

Mode of Inquiry and Data Sources
Writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) is a means of using writing as thinking. When researchers use writing as a method of analysis, they use their extensive theoretical knowledge of a subject to ask questions of the data, providing a variety of interpretations from which to make meaning. We used email interactions, drafts of one author’s dissertation, and notes from phone conversations during the writing of the dissertation to consider the idea of authorship and the writing of methodology. The main question we asked of our data was: How do we acknowledge, theorize, and represent the knowledge production that happens in the collaborative writing of a single-authored text?

Results
We concluded that the theorization of writing partners had to be a part of an ongoing process that occurred during all parts of research. It is necessary to contend with not only how writing functions but also how co-writing functions. As a result, the subject position of author shifts, taking on different meanings, and transferring back and forth between the two writing partners. The result is that questions of authorship become as critical to thinking and writing methodology, as do issues of ethics, rigor, and validity.

Significance
In the dissertation, there is little, if any, room to represent the questions of the author-function. We argue that space is needed to represent the effects of writing partnerships on methodology even in the structured form of the dissertation so that postmodern researchers in particular can align their theories and methodologies. This would allow scholars to enact the kind of rigorous interrogation of the research process that allows postmodern researchers to continue to push the boundaries of conventional qualitative research.

Authors

• Jessica Van Cleave, Mars Hill University

• Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, Georgia State University