Crafting Collaborative Research Methodologies

Leaps and Bounds in Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Christina Hee Pedersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367649296
• eBook ISBN: 9781000372960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Crafting Collaborative Research Methodologies demonstrates a number of collaborative, visual and narrative methods that explore the promises and the ethical, relational complexities inherent in collaborative research.

It engages with both the potentials and complexities of doing collaborative analysis and offers a medley of methods for analysis. These methods revolve around co-produced texts from Peru, Denmark and Bolivia, and involve images, memory work and practical approaches to intersectionality thinking. Through detailed explorations of the complex interweaving of issues of meaning-making, difference and the co-production of knowledges, dynamics of social exclusion and segregation become visible in the nexus between evocation and interpretation. Christina Hee Pedersen takes up the poststructuralist challenge of including researcher subjectivity as part of the analysis and, through a lively writing style, the reader is invited to engage in this analysis of the performativity of selves.

This book can inspire analytical thinking for researchers and advanced students interested in expanding the rich dialogues among feminists doing poststructuralist and interdisciplinary inquiry, and for all students of qualitative and collaborative methodologies.

Chapter 1

Speaking an opening text

About thinking positions

As countless feminist thinkers have shown, knowledges are never neutral or universal. What is written and said is always dependent on a specific context, and with whom, for whom and for what knowledge is created. Political visions, experiences, notions of difference and identity and the interests of an author will always be present in a text. In this first chapter, I will draw out a landscape to give the reader an idea of the thinking positions and experiences I will bring to the book.

My wish has been to contribute to ongoing discussions about how research and the struggle for radical social change relate and are entangled. The subtitle of the book, Leaps and Bounds, refers to the unpredictable, complex, tensional and wonderful processes of creating knowledges with others. It refers to moments when you experience delighted leaps of understanding but also to moments when you stumble right into a pitfall or bump into boundaries of resistance in your analytical work. It also attempts to show how taking as your point of departure a text about a personal experience can work as a place of encounter with others and across difference, as mostly feminist poststructuralist and critical collaborative researchers have shown before me. Throughout the chapters, I argue that collaborative research methodologies, which dare to ignore, resist and challenge our mental and institutional frontiers, at their best can create moments of human encounters that shake up conventional ideas about difference, norms, academic tradition and meaning-making; moments when glimpses of not yet existing realities and relations can emerge, be explored and stimulate the urge to act together for change.

I would love to be able to write, as does Kent De Spain at the beginning of his book, about movement improvisation: ‘This is a simple book about a complicated matter’ (De Spain, 2014). However, the writing of the book has been a consistently complicated and tensional matter. The dense context of radically changed universities and the pressures on academic work(ers) has made the act of writing an activity characterized by numerous interruptions and involuntary disruptions. I have repeatedly left, returned to, and arrived at the empirical material and to the crafting of analysis (Davies & Petersen, 2005; Harré et al., 2017; Pelias, 2017; Pedersen & Phillips, 2019). But the considerable number of years of getting together the book have at the same time been an adventure of joyful generation of co-produced insights with a vast number of colleagues with whom I have talked, walked, written and learned, and from whom I received invaluable feedback on these chapters.

About the book and its style

It has been quite an undertaking to transform and bring into an academic text remembered embodied practices. The writing of the book has been what Elisabeth St. Pierre talks about as a ‘“circling writing practice”, where the text writes its author “a fiction, a rhizome travelling into spaces I could never fully predict” (St. Pierre, 1997a; Foucault, 1983). Lisa Hill, who also works with memories, describes her writing style as unsettling. Writing, she says, is ‘a subtle form of montage that operates by juxtaposition and discontinuity’. Her writing style evokes multiple meanings and representations, and she creates texts where the different sections ‘are deliberately left unstated so that the reader can detect alternative potentialities and narrative trajectories, times and places, presences and absences. Yet it remains faithful to the walk, to the landscape, to our conversations’ (Hill, 2013, p. 393). This description echoes my sense of what my process and style have been. I also wish to invite the reader into thinking of alternative potentialities and narrative trajectories with my material and my ways of taking on analysis.

I think of this body of work as a representation, a condensed construction of illustrations, invitations and arguments. It is a story of a person, of groups, of movements, of institutions and of times. As a blurred genre, the writing style simultaneously interweaves analytical concepts, personal experience, reflexivity, issues of politics and human value, philosophy and detailed practical research moves. This resembles nomadic writing, in which a number of discussions and related topics flow into and through each other while ‘walking’. I hope the reader will also let themselves enter the unexpected flows, and be led by the hand into the pleasures of texts, in what I hope could be a journey that will inspire, maybe provoke, but ultimately lead to thoughtfulness with regard to analytical work that crosses disciplines.

I have attempted to simultaneously fixate and open, demonstrate and trouble, an already fluid process of knowledge production that I have been part of for so many years. An overall aspiration has been my wish to inspire others into doable processes of research (Davies et al., 2004; St. Pierre, 2015; St. Pierre & Lather, 2013; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2008), which make a difference in the contexts, where they unfold, and allow the researchers to actively position themselves as political beings in their research. Put differently, a recurring ambition that links all the chapters is one of how we, through collaboration, can learn and make of scholarly practices productive resources that feed into ongoing processes of social inquiry aiming at social change. As global citizens, we desperately need to cultivate respectful human coexistence. We need to work for a just redistribution of wealth and, as I see it, to radically trouble the way individualism and overarching economic rationality have permeated almost all human fields of existence. We need processes of knowledge production that enable us to care for each other and urgently act in relation to the severe situations of conflict, displacement and climate change on our planet – in a necessary tension between slow and rapid moves. This process is taking place already.

The text is also detailed, diving into small reflexive explorations of fragments of knowledges (co)produced through joint improvisation and experimentation. These have had many forms as I have written and re(written) most of the fragments and larger texts over a considerable timespan (Pedersen, 2004–2020). As such, the book as product is, at its heart, a performance and like any performance it is an embodiment of language in the here and now of the writing as formulated by Spry (Spry, 2011).

The book is therefore an assemblage of texts ‘on the move’ and my shifting from one discursive form to ‘the other’, plus my use of basic poststructuralist notions, can be said to be a challenge or a disturbance for the reader. The reader must accept this as a precondition to be able to follow the flow. My choice of genre is conscious, and grounded in my interest in exploring the promises of methodological collaboration in qualitative research through experimentation. Through a variety of takes on (sometimes experimental) methodology/analysis, I wish to give examples of how, in the encounter with what we all too uncritically came to name ‘the different other’ in academic texts, it becomes possible to produce mobilizing insights about the potentialities of the gift of everyday human life.

Nevertheless I think that my particular ‘walk of writing’ represents not only discontinuity but also the opposite; both a constructed continuity but also a continuity of living ideas from feminist poststructuralist thinking and from the womens’ movement of my youth. I have tried to bridge time and landscapes to perform some kind of logic when it comes to structuring both for myself and my readers (Dervin & Foreman, 2003).

The first two chapters touch upon the way I think of pivotal theoretical concepts like collaboration, difference, narrative, power, knowledge and subjectivity. In the following two chapters I introduce ‘The Image Exercise’ and put it to work (Chapter 3 and 4). Then three chapters unfold the possibilities and tensions involved in working with the collaborative methodology memory work (Chapters 5, 6 and 7). The next section consists of two chapters where I perform two ‘experiments’ with texts. Here I write a bit on ways to go about analysis following an intention to destabilize the taken for granted following intersectional thinking. Both chapters propose analytical strategies for group analysis of texts with the aim of disturbing embedded norms and normative frameworks, but Chapter 9 furthermore engages in exploring the potentialities of the double move between evocation and analysis by letting a collage of texts do the work. In Chapter 10, I illustrate and communicate a number of examples of how to generate interesting material for collaborative analysis and, finally, in the last chapter, Louise Phillips and Bolette Frydendahl Larsen join me in a conversation about the dynamic relationship between research and activism. This format is an exploration of what letter writing can do when we reflect upon and respond to the text of ‘the other’.

Thus, I have put together the chapters so that they will illustrate analytical practices as processes of collective learning through analysis. Leaps and bounds in the title also refer to the energy and the speed of change produced in moments of encounter and connection, where insights are produced collectively and the folds of life fold into unexpected new folds based on trust in one another (Davies, 2000b).

All by herself?

Being a book about collaboration and dialogue, a book that brings a huge amount of co-produced knowledges into play, it is, of course, paradoxical that I have written all chapters apart from the last one ‘all by myself’. This certainly is a standing contradiction as I love to work with others, need to try out ideas with others, think when I talk with others and enjoy co-creation immensely. Many factors would be able to explain this enigma, some of them being institutional, geographic, questions of time, age, ambition, health, coincidence and workload. However, I hope that the presence of the many co-producers of these pages will be felt vividly. When you read, you know you have been there, that we have been there together. Fortunately, the process of getting together the book has been filled with conversations, feedback and an overspill of inspiration from many good colleagues, especially those from my research group, Dialogic Communication at Roskilde University in Denmark. Precisely because I have written the book alone, I am extra happy that Bolette Frydendahl Larsen and Louise Phillip agreed to enter a dialogue about the relationship between research and activism, which we hope will function as opening texts which touch upon the main contents of the book and close its last chapter.

Questions of language and translation

I consider it important to bring in empirical material from non-English speaking contexts, as it allows the consideration of voices that are not often heard, and that due to other contexts might open up to quite different analytical pathways. An imperative is to take up the challenge and go against the lack of a presence of non-English native speaking researchers in the terrain of transnational dialogues about collaborative research methodologies and contribute from a place of a slightly different ‘texture’ (Vandaele, 2016). My empirical material stems from different geographical sites and studies (Bolivia, Peru, Denmark Sweden, Norway, Mexico, EEUU and Spain) all of which aims to show how the immense creative capacity of human beings, if we dare to rely on it – in the making – through joint analysis can establish platforms for action and utopian thinking. I also hope that my contribution occasionally will disturb some of the stereotypical and romanticized images of Scandinavian culture, and specifically Scandinavian gender relations. Also important to mention are the many translations between Spanish, Danish and English which have taken place during writing as a lot of the empirical material was originally written in Spanish or Danish.

The fact that I write in English, and not in my mother tongue Danish, has been an additional challenge, which adds a special kind of productive obstruction to the writing process. The effort involved in expressing yourself in another language in terms of thinking, power and communication is often ignored by non-English speaking academics themselves. It is a taken-for-granted condition for participation in academic dialogue. However, it influences our writing in specific ways, establishes norms and figures of thought that we take in from an outsider position, from reading English in academic texts to struggling to obtain a fluidity that we as writers can identify with and recognise in ourselves.

Bodies and ideas on the move

Being nomadic and dialogical, movement is key to the contents in the chapters. I travel between different geographical places, different times, different sexualities, different theories, genders and ages. Despite being a worn-out metaphor to depict movement, I still find the journey a suitable one to describe displacement, space, passage and transformation. Ideas travel when we produce knowledges, and while moving we meet new realities and the possibilities for learning and for creating important insights increase. However, movement and speed have become violently embodied as imperative in contemporary times of all-embracing neoliberal discourses and technocratic and technological development. As academics and, certainly, without always wanting to do so, we give life to this development with our agency. As scholars, we practise newspeak, celebrate first movers, compete undauntedly with each other; we review and evaluate over and over again as an imposed ritual. Few of us question that the right direction to perform a movement is forward and few question the positive connotations of ‘innovation’. These conditions affect knowledge production radically.

As I am now in my mid-sixties, I look back and relate to nostalgia more often than I did before. In the book, I hope to show the hidden potentials of looking back in time to find unexpected and unfamiliar sites and phenomena where, from a situated ‘now’, I perform new writings and make strange and at times uncomfortable readings possible. I hope these readings of the past can inspire the ‘nows’ of today for younger generations of researchers; ‘nows’ that allow them to reinvent themselves through their engagement and enchantment with what emerges in relation to their own research situations and desires (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 540).

Research accounts, like any other everyday life narrative, will always be constructions and reconstructions based upon ideas about ‘who we were, are and are becoming’ (Hyle et al., 2008, p. 8; Juckes, 2017). The book is also nomadic in the sense that the texts for analysis imply a complex, intimate relationship between past, present and future, which will flow into one another while you work with them. I will shortly halt them in their flow and then bring them into new contexts so that we, through analysis, will have a chance to make sense of them in the here and now.

I have lived my university years in a time of wrestling with theory within many disciplines; a time of intense searching for ways to understand contemporary technological changes and radical clashes between different ontologies – a breaking up of old forms o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of drawings and templates
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Speaking an opening text: About thinking positions
• 2 A conceptual repertoire for analysis: Crosscutting concepts
• 3 ‘The Image Exercise’: A collaborative method to explore relations and meanings
• 4 Putting ‘The Image Exercise’ to work: On gender and humour
• 5 To take on memory work: Surrendering to collaboration and process
• 6 Longing for feminist activism: The doings in memory work
• 7 Bodies in a text: Exploring the productivity of difference
• 8 Attending to the tensions: Putting intersectional thinking to work
• 9 Taking in and speaking out social differentiation: Moving evocation and interpretation
• 10 Pushing the boundaries: Ideas to generate texts for analysis
• 11 Opening a closure – the tensions, leaps and stumbles: A dialogue on research and activism
• Bibliography