Working at the Wonder: Collaborative Writing as Method of Inquiry

Abstract

This article offers a discussion concerning the future of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. Taking the form of a dialogic exchange, we take up Isabelle Stengers’ notion of “wonder” as a creative and political lens through which to consider the disruptive, radical, and productive methodological capacity that collaborative writing as a research method potentially offers. Working particularly with Deleuze and Guattari, we argue that language in collaborative writing practices is deeply entangled with complex materialist practice, and through engagements with these “matterings” we make sense of collaborative writing as immanent event. We discuss—and experience—the challenges that collaborative writing has for research and this article pushes at established categories, works against the fixities of conventional theory construction, contests the humanist and phenomenological proclivities that arguably limit the process and effectiveness of collaborative writing as method of inquiry, and wonders at the immensities that are possible.

Time Across the Lines: Collaborative Wonderings Under COVID-19

“…For Gale and Wyatt (2017) , the term “wonder” draws attention to the “potential” collaborative writing has to “take us [. .…”

“…In rekindling our friendship in this collaborative autoethnographic piece, we work to make sense of, what the title of the project has referred to in temporal terms as, “the time of COVID.” Gale and Wyatt’s (2009) “between the twos” approach to collaborative-writing-as-inquiry enables us to “write-to-it”—“‘it’ being the query or problem” ( Gale & Wyatt, 2017 ). In this case, both the query and the problem, prompted through our diary entries in response to the project, 1 lead us to ask: What does time mean?…”

Logged in While Locked Down: Exploring the Influence of Digital Technologies in the Time of Corona

“…Even though there are two of us, and even though the three narrative accounts we present were brought about as a result of a highly cooperative effort of mutual engagement in which we used collaborative writing ( Gale & Wyatt, 2010 ) and writing as a method of inquiry ( Richardson & St Pierre, 2018 ) to tease out evocative descriptions ( Tyler, 1986 ) of mundane experiences, we deliberately use the singular first-person form throughout the narratives.…”

Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine: Post‐qualitative re‐turnings

“…Both these conceptual tools perform similar functions as they disturb binaries present in the practisings of academic life. However they are put to work in this article, not to produce a smoothness but to jar, disturb and blur the un‐sense of writing the AcademicConferenceMachine (Gale & Wyatt, ). These writings attempt to hold to Lather's () impulse ‘toward innovations leading to new forms, toward negotiation with enabling violence attentive to frame narratives that works against the terrain of controllable knowledge’ (p. 221).…”