Remember the days of long ago, when you could bury your head in the stacks, and sit for hours thinking, researching, and writing? Along those lines, remember when an academic job was 40% research, 40% teaching and 20% service (or something similar)?
Faced with the growing climate of hostility against academics and the reality of the University in the age of neoliberalism, one quickly realizes that those things listed above were a pipe dream, a figment of our cultural imagination, or rather something that never really existed. The reality for those of us lucky enough to be in the tenure track might still be a 40/40/20 percent split on paper but ends up being/feeling more like 40% research/ 50-60% teaching and 40-50% service. While the time and academic should devote towards research may not have risen, there is no correspondent reduction in the amount of research required for tenure and promotion, if anything those numbers are also creeping up as our productivity is now measure in countable outcomes (i.e. publications, exhibitions, creative media work). For those of us working as lecturers and adjunct those numbers are skewed even higher, and while research may not be a required of lecturers/adjuncts, if one hopes to get a tenure track job, an active research career is a must.
So what does this have to do with the idea of Collaborative Production?
Perhaps 21st Century scholarship
should look less like this and more like this or this
or even this
In our event on Slow Scholarship at SCMS, “The ‘Collaborative Production’ category will promote expansive thinking upon the sites of academic production and distribution.” In other words how can we help each other research, write and get our work out?
This prompt got us thinking about some of the ways in which our own scholarship has actually been dependent of collaboration, informal meetings with friends to talk about research ideas, writing groups, reading groups, etc…
What does collaboration look like for you?
What are some of the ways you collaborate?
Are there other ways that you would like to collaborate?
How do we make collaboration part of tenure/work so that all of our work is acknowledged?
Some sites to consider in terms of collaboration: