The Power of Collaboration
The focus now shifts from interaction to collaboration. This book has involved collaboration of different kinds. Each of the contributors has collaborated with me by sending me their work and giving me permission to include it. There is trust and goodwill
- PDF / 299,831 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 70 Downloads / 229 Views
the power of collaboration
The focus now shifts from interaction to collaboration. This book has involved collaboration of different kinds. Each of the contributors has collaborated with me by sending me their work and giving me permission to include it. There is trust and goodwill involved in such action – and keeping fidelity to these texts was the way I could reciprocate. A good illustration of how collaboration can work well is in Travels With Ernest: Bridging the Literary/Sociological Divide (Richardson & Lockridge, 2004) in which Laurel Richardson and her husband Ernest Lockridge individually wrote narratives of their travels that ‘crisscrossed personal and professional’ boundaries and in the process of writing, reading and questioning each other, remembered and resolved old wounds. Laurel and I collaborated on the production of Permission too. Early on, we discussed the book, before it was a formal proposal, and found agreement on its focus. I offered her the right of veto to preclude anything she wasn’t happy with and sharing power in this way was important part of this collaboration. The book was not intended to be biographical, but to focus on how her work has affected the work of others. When the contributions arrived, and the writing project changed so significantly, we collaborated again on how the book project might proceed. Laurel offered insight and valuable ideas and assisted me to organise and structure the book, thereby working collaboratively to help its shape to emerge. The first contribution here is Mitch Allen’s Found Correspondence that shows us something about their long-term collaboration as author and publisher. Mitch playfully innovates on Laurel’s own work and words: While each sentence is Laurel’s, the original context of her statements has been jettisoned. Sentences were aggregated into paragraphs thematically and ordered into a narrative by me. Next is a co-authored piece by Lorelei Carpenter and elke emerald who draw upon Laurel Richardson’s ‘writing stories’ for their current work where they write collaboratively to try to understand: The weight of neoliberalism on the research activities for academics today. Jane Reece writes about the collaborative work at Bristol University where the brevity of language from Laurel Richardson’s Three-Word Workshop presented at
89
chapter 7
the ICQI conference became creatively employed. Reece writes of the importance of the Twitter group project (Bridges et al., 2014) for her, particularly when things went wrong one day in the prison in which she taught. Later she took the project: To the classroom where, witnessing the learner-offender-writer-men positioned in their often traumatic lives, ‘Take three words’ became the opening exercise for Monday morning classes. Jenny Ritchie also writes about attending Laurel Richardson’s Three-Word Workshop at ICQI and the permission she gained from her texts. She shares her writing from that time where she documents her family’s recent trauma and healing. The last piece by Ye Hong describes the power of
Data Loading...
