Collective Writing: The Continuous Struggle for Meaning-Making

Abstract

This paper is a summary of philosophy, theory, and practice arising from collective writing experiments conducted between 2016 and 2022 in the community associated with the Editors’ Collective and more than 20 scholarly journals. The main body of the paper summarises the community’s insights into the many faces of collective writing. Appendix 1 presents the workflow of the article’s development. Appendix 2 lists approximately 100 collectively written scholarly articles published between 2016 and 2022. Collective writing is a continuous struggle for meaning-making, and our research insights merely represent one milestone in this struggle. Collective writing can be designed in many different ways, and our workflow merely shows one possible design that we found useful. There are many more collectively written scholarly articles than we could gather, and our reading list merely offers sources that the co-authors could think of. While our research insights and our attempts at synthesis are inevitably incomplete, ‘Collective Writing: The Continuous Struggle for Meaning-Making’ is a tiny theoretical steppingstone and a useful overview of sources for those interested in theory and practice of collective writing.

Understanding Digital Inequality: A Theoretical Kaleidoscope

“…Greene ( 2007 ) considers it an approach that is sometimes deemed countercultural since the academic norm, particularly in the humanities, is the lone scholar, and the ‘gold standard’ writing product is the single-authored monograph. Collaborative writing has particular pragmatics and ethics: as a ‘coming together’, as an observational tool (Magnusson 2021 ), and as a method of inquiry (Gale and Bowstead 2013 ), pushing us towards a different understanding, a continuous struggle for meaning-making (Jandrić et al 2022a , b ). Starting from where we are, we acknowledge the problems as we generate a shared sense of, and hope for, higher education ‘otherwise’.…”

“…The other is the need to resist definitions of the kaleidoscope research method (see Jandrić and Ford 2022 ; Jandrić 2022 ). Yet another is to beware of the apparent infinity of kaleidoscopic opportunity–all that glitters is not gold (Jandrić et al 2022a , b ). And yet another is to think carefully through connections between this theoretical richness and practical reality (hopefully through the concept of critical praxis) (McLaren and Jandrić 2020 ).…”

Moving from responsibility learning inaction to ‘responsibility learning-in-action’: A student-educator collective writing on the ‘unnoticed’ in the hidden curriculum at business schools

“…Collective writing enables us to resist, together (Abdellatif et al, 2021). It is a form of epistemic resistance, through providing writers the opportunity to redress unequal power relations, access and take part in knowledge production (Jandrić et al, 2022). Diversi et al (2021) have described it as 'an act of leaning on each other in order to make sense of thinking and narrating hope and resistance' (p. 302), which resonates deeply with us as fellow students, educator, learners, and writers.…”

The Postdigital-Biodigital Revolution

“…Subversion of form does have limits, because it ideally has to carry an argument or a narrative and if you have more than 20 players, that starts to look differently [we explored this in detail in our latest collective article, ‘Collective Writing: The Continuous Struggle for Meaning-Making’ (Jandrić et al 2022b )]. Petar’s done some very large collective articles, some of which have more than 80 authors (e.g., Jandrić et al 2020 , 2021 , 2022a ).…”

“…Unsurprisingly, our community’s work collectively written articles, gathered around the Editors’ Collective, 10 was resisted all the way by the publishers. Instead of budging on their resistance, however, we also developed something called the open review, where the reviewers are not hidden and they become a part of the process (see Jackson et al 2018 ; Jandrić et al 2022b ).…”