Negotiating the challenge of collaborative writing: learning from one writing group's mutiny

Abstract

With continuing pressure to publish or perish, interventions such as writing groups are increasingly part of the academic landscape. In this paper, we discuss our writing group's experiment with collaborative writing, which came unstuck as simmering concerns led to a mutiny within the group. The mutiny provided insights into tensions that are inevitably present in writing groups and collaborative writing exercises but are seldom written about. We explore these tensions via a collaborative autoethnography, drawing on published literature on writing groups and collaborative writing. The mutiny revealed three key dynamics. Experienced voices can have an important role to play but these voices need to be moderated so that other voices might be recognised and valued. Pleasure and productivity are two necessary components for sustaining writing groups and writing collaborations. Finally, hierarchies in the academic context are inescapable but they can be renegotiated so that more enabling power relations can be generated.

Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

“…A number of collective departmental endeavours began at this time: "cake day", where both staff and postgraduates were rostered on to provide a cake once a week, connecting over food and conversation and breaking down barriers; the PhD writing group, where a number of doctoral scholars met regularly to read and comment on each other's work; and the particular endeavour that sparked this paper, a reading group arising out of concerns raised over postgraduate student mental health by then-postgraduate coordinator Deirdre Hart. Our efforts to collectivise the care of doctoral scholars and to draw on the "surplus" abilities and contributions of the scholars themselves builds on the theoretical work and related supervisory experiences coming out of members of the Community Economies Collective (See for example, Cameron, Nairn, & Higgins, 2009;Dombroski, 2016aDombroski, , 2016bNairn et al, 2015).…”

Writing together to foster wellbeing: doctoral writing groups as spaces of wellbeing

“…Similar to other scholars, we used collaborative autoethnography to explore our experiences of Write-Ins and how they influenced wellbeing in different ways (Hains-Wesson & Young, 2016;Nairn et al, 2015). Here, as a community of researchers, we became the researched.…”

Developing Academics’ Capacity for Internationalizing the Curriculum: A Collaborative Autoethnography of a Cross-Institutional Project

“…Earlier CAE studies provide insight into collaboration between educational developers and academics (e.g., Bayerlein & McGrath, 2018), among educational developers (e.g., Hains-Wesson & Young, 2017), and among academics (e.g., Nairn et al, 2015). Although these studies offer critical analysis of collaboration, most investigated a relatively small number of collaborators and short-term projects, whereas our study involved six authors from three institutions working on a 3-year project.…”