Writing with research partners ‘from the field’: Plural knowledges and epistemic justice in qualitative research

Abstract

Despite longstanding calls for more inclusive geographical research and the increasing adoption of participatory research designs, our non-academic research partners ‘from the field’ continue to be excluded from a central aspect of knowledge production: academic writing and publishing. This exclusion is not only an epistemological issue of limited knowledge perspectives but also an ethical problem of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). While participatory research has fostered collaboration in data collection and analysis, academic writing remains largely restricted to scholars, perpetuating traditional power asymmetries in knowledge dissemination. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature review and personal experience with collaborative writing, I argue that co-authoring with non-academic research partners can enrich academic knowledge production by incorporating plural knowledges while simultaneously challenging academic gatekeeping. However, writing with non-academic partners is not a straightforward process; it necessitates transforming the ineluctable position of the academic as a gatekeeper into that of a mediator in the co-production of knowledge. Based on leading examples, I outline a structured approach to developing meaningful writing partnerships, focusing on three key strategies: (1) creating a writing relationship and negotiating positionality; (2) investing time, respecting different urgencies, and sharing resources; and (3) finding a common language, breaking conventions, and challenging academic standards. By embracing these strategies, we can take steps towards a more inclusive and multi-voiced geography that actively redistributes epistemic authority.

Keywords

Participatory knowledge production collaborative writing epistemic justice decolonialisation in science qualitative research ethnography

I Introduction

Despite longstanding calls for more inclusive geographical research, academic knowledge production continues to exclude those who contribute to it. While participatory research designs have gained traction, our research partners ‘from the field’ remain largely excluded from academic writing and publishing and are thereby absent from the dissemination of knowledge for which they are experts and which they inform. This exclusion is as much an epistemological issue of a limited knowledge perspective (Haraway, 1988) as an ethical one of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007).

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of writing with non-academic research partners as a means of addressing these deficiencies. I argue that this kind of co-authorship enriches academic research through plural knowledges while challenging traditional academic gatekeeping and the power relations embedded in academic knowledge production. However, writing with non-academic partners is not a straightforward process and involves complexities beyond the act of writing itself. This necessitates transforming the ineluctable position of the academic as a gatekeeper into that of a mediator by creating meaningful writing relationships based on trust, time, the exchange of resources and a breaking with academic conventions.

Knowledge carries power (Foucault, 1970, 1972) and different forms of knowledge carry and thus stabilise or destabilise specific power relations. Feminist and postcolonial researchers were among the first to highlight the ‘situatedness of knowledge’ (Haraway, 1988) and the colonial and patriarchal power relations embedded in hegemonic forms of knowledge, veiled as universal by a claim to neutrality and objectivity (Bondi, 1997; Rose, 1997; Said, 1979; Spivak, 1988). As famously framed by Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘every view is a view from somewhere and every act of speaking a speaking from somewhere’ (Abu-Lughod, 1991: 141). Put differently, academic knowledge production has been criticized for being partial, to reproduce hegemonic power relations and to rest on the epistemic exclusion of knowledges that are reduced to the status of experiences to be explored and represented by scientists (Spivak, 1988).

Recently, the neglect of underrepresented perspectives in academic knowledge has been addressed as an ethical problem of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007; Grasswick, 2017, see also Wilson and Darling, 2020a). ‘Epistemic injustices’, the moral philosopher Miranda Fricker writes, are those injustices where a wrong is done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’ (Fricker 2007: 1). The concept of epistemic (in)justice, which was first formulated by Fricker (Fricker, 2007) and since then further elaborated upon predominantly by moral philosophers (Kidd et al., 2017), addresses the concrete communicative practices that lead to the inclusion or exclusion of forms of knowledge (Pohlhaus et al., 2017: 1) and how epistemic resources are distributed. It also raises questions about how we interact with our epistemic partners (Holmes and Marcus, 2020) in the research process and what roles we assign to them. The concept of epistemic (in)justice also resonates with longstanding debates in human geography on ethics, inclusiveness and relevance (e.g. AAG, 1998/2024; Barnett, 2012; Fuller, 2008; Fuller and Askins, 2010; Henn et al., 2022; Jazeel and McFarlane, 2007, 2010; Mitchell and Draper, 1982; Olson, 2015; Rose, 1993; Smith, 1997, 2001; Wilson and Darling, 2020b), as well as with calls for recognizing alternative bodies and forms of knowledge (e.g. Bondi et al., 2002; Herman, 2008; Johnson et al., 2007; Louis, 2007; Moss and Donovan, 2017; Panelli, 2010; Shaw et al., 2006; Sibley, 1995; Women and Geography Study Group, 1997).

However, it remains somewhat unclear what a more multi-voiced science and sharing epistemic authority in academia might look like. With regard to qualitative research, an important approach is participatory research design, which seeks to establish a dialogical relationship between researchers and research participants (Bergold and Thomas, 2012; Kindon et al., 2007; Pain, 2004). However, while participatory research has made strides in collaboration in the field (c.p. Chatterton et al., 2018; Coombes et al., 2014; Derickson and Routledge, 2014; Kindon et al., 2024; Reason and Bradbury, 2012; Reiter and Oslender, 2015; Tipa et al., 2009), the act of writing remains largely dominated by academic authors (Nimführ and Blank, 2023).

Writing and publishing are crucial components of the actual production of knowledge (Deleuze, 1990; Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; St Pierre, 2007). Moreover, according to Fricker, being able to participate in the spread of knowledge is an essential attribute of personhood (Fricker, 2007: 58-59). In an extension of Appadurai’s ‘right to research’ (Appadurai, 2006), one might thus also speak of a right to publish for those who inform academic knowledge production. Attempts by academics to share their epistemic authority by co-authoring with their research partners, however, are rare, and few find their way into high-impact academic publishing (e.g.; Ngurra et al., 2019; Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019; Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Cahill et al., 2004; Down and Hughes, 2009; Lees and Robinson, 2021; Nimführ and Sesay, 2019), while most of these attempts find themselves at the margins (e.g. Colectivo Situaciones, 2002; Colectivo Situaciones and MTD De Solano, 2002; Red Popular De Mujeres De la Sabana, 2017; Sangtin Writers and Nagar, 2006). Consequently, reflections on writing with research partners are even more scarce (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019; Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Blank and Nimführ, 2023; Down and Hughes, 2009; Nagar, 2013, 2014).

In the following, I reflect on the conditions, challenges, and opportunities of publishing together with non-academic research partners. I argue that writing with partners usually excluded from the dissemination of knowledge is a way to reduce epistemic injustice and to contribute to the richness of our research. To illustrate this, I present leading examples of collaborative writing, highlighting their contributions to epistemically richer and more just knowledge production. Building on both literature and personal experience, I then outline three key strategies for fostering meaningful writing collaborations with our epistemic partners: (1) creating a writing relationship and negotiating positionality; (2) spending time, respecting different urgencies, and sharing resources; and (3) finding a common language, breaking conventions, and challenging academic standards. Embracing these strategies can be a step towards a truly multi-voiced and decolonised geography.

II Sharing academic epistemic authority by publishing together

Writing with research partners can involve very different partnerships and take on different formats. There has always been collaborative publishing by scholars with non-university academic experts. However, I am interested in collaborations with non-academic research partners ‘from the field’ who usually appear as research subjects or even objects in studies, rather than as writing partners, and who may have distinct ways of knowing and expressing knowledge. In fact, the very concept of ‘the field’ already submits the everyday lifeworlds of our knowledge partners as objects of inquiry. It not only perpetuates ‘colonial practices and theories of research fed into the imperial machine’ (Nhemachena et al., 2016: 16), but can also obstruct our view of the relationships of our knowledge partners to their space/place (Bawaka Country et al., 2016). In the following, I will therefore only refer to ‘non-academic research partners’, ‘knowledge partners’ or ‘epistemic partners’ to designate the persons who inform our research as interview partners and guides through everyday worlds which we are getting to know.

When we look at collaborations with these groups previously excluded from the dissemination of academic knowledge, we find very different forms and degrees to which academic authority is shared. A whole series of examples was presented in the early 2000s by the Argentine academic writing collective Colectivo Situaciones, writing together with several Argentine social movements (Colectivo Situaciones, 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Colectivo Situaciones and MTD De Solano, 2002). In its texts, the collective consisting of sociologists, political scientists and philosophers, reflects with various movement actors on the conditions and practices of social movement action in the context of neoliberalisation and crisis. A decisive characteristic of these conversations is that they are conceived of as militant research for social movements. The texts, which were self-published, take the form of conversations or interviews with selected groups that have developed innovative protest forms and organising practices. The aim is to reflect collectively on the knowledge embedded in these practices and to make it available to other movement actors by publishing it. In the editorial of their publication series ‘situaciones’ the Colectivo Situaciones writes:

“Situaciones aims to be a project of ‘internal’ reading of the struggles, a phenomenology (a genealogy) and not an ‘objective’ description, because only in this way does thought assume a creative, affirmative function, in order to stop being a mere reproduction of the existing” (Colectivo Situaciones, 2002, no page numbers, translation by the author).

The Colectivo Situaciones thus presents a blueprint for collaborative writing that explicitly renounces academia in order to make a different knowledge production possible. In the methodological lead-up to the volume with MTD de Solano, they radically turn away from the concept of the author as the one being responsible for what is written (Colectivo Situaciones and MTD De Solano, 2002: 9-10). Likewise, they challenge the prevalent notion of a researcher, criticising how the researcher is rendered invisible by the process itself and how they assume the role of an intellectual arbiter who judges what is considered true (ibid.). Without referring to it, the assessment of this writing collective is strongly reminiscent of Haraway’s work and her criticism of the ‘god trick’ of seeing from nowhere everything’ (Haraway, 1988: 581). The result is written conversations that allow the reader to participate in the experiences and reflections of the respective co-producing social movements and that are radically rooted in the concrete situation without pretending to make any resulting generalisations. However, though consciously evading the requirements of academic knowledge production in order to produce ‘living’ collective thought beyond academia, the texts of the Colectivo Situaciones have been strongly received within the academic community working on the matter of subject.

While in the case of the Colectivo Situaciones sharing academic epistemic authority takes on the form of turning away from academia, on the other side of the spectrum, we find collaborations striving to penetrate the institutional strongholds of the academic world. For instance, geographer Loretta Lees and her co-author, Beverly Robinson, have chosen to publish an article in an international journal that undergoes double-blind peer review (Lees and Robinson, 2021). ‘Beverley’s Story’ is an article about the consequences of gentrification and displacement from the perspective of an affected individual. The article is a combination of an autobiographical account by Robinson of her struggle against displacement and an accompanying ethnographic biography by Lees of that struggle. Specifically, the article follows a typical ethnographic model by writing about Robinson in the third person, interspersed with original sounds in the form of quotations. With their article, the two authors wish to set a model ‘of how academics and those they research (with) can co-produce an academic paper’ (Lees and Robinson, 2021: 592). Again, as with Colectivo Situaciones, the idea is to abandon the level of generalisation and to contribute with a perspective from inside a struggle. Though neither the actual writing process nor the model itself is reflected in the piece, the authors claim that this approach has opened up space for affective dimensions, emotional geographies and embodied experiences that are usually underrepresented in geographic research (Lees and Robinson, 2021: 591). However, the authors do not only aim at contributing different knowledge contents but also other speaking positions to the debate:

“The article considers the emotional journey that Beverley has experienced and in so doing listens to her own articulation of the violence and hostility she experienced and indeed continues to experience today (Lees and Robinson, 2021: 591, emphasis in the original).

The article thus makes a double move very similar to the endeavour of the Colectivo Situaciones in that, first, particular experience is given its own value of what is worth knowing, and secondly, this particularity worth knowing is not appropriated and shaped by the academic, but is articulated in the forms of knowledge belonging to the experience in the first place. As the authors write, Robinson ‘narrates her own everyday, lived experience of surviving gentrification, thinking reflexively and critically examining her own subject position throughout’ (Lees and Robinson, 2021: 595). In this way, the article also addresses the ethical dimension of epistemic justice by recognising Robinson’s knowledge as such and incorporating it into the body of knowledge. Further, the authors point to the emotional effect that the opportunity to publish can have on co-authors:

“In ‘doing’ the autobiography presented in this article (and indeed in co-authoring this article), Beverley has been able to attend to what Butler (2010) calls ‘grievability’—a private and public mourning for her home and community, as a testimony to the state-sponsored violence of gentrification” (Lees and Robinson, 2021: 610).

A similar design is presented by Sarah Nimführ and Buba Sesay, writing also in a peer-reviewed journal on the (im)mobilities of non-deportable refugees in Southern Europe (Nimführ and Sesay, 2019). In this scenario, a cultural anthropologist collaborates with a refugee residing in Southern Europe who was actively involved in the anthropologist’s ethnographic fieldwork. Unlike Lees and Robinson, the two authors do not singularly highlight the specific experience of the co-author. Instead, they present an ethnographic narrative in the third person, weaving the voice of the non-academic co-author in an ‘auto-ethnographic style’ (ibid., p. 3), interspersed among other quoted voices. The authors criticise that studies on the situations of refugees are often written by people who lack first-hand experience with forced migration and counter this with an approach that is intended to utilise the power of auto-ethnography as ‘witnessing’ (ibid., p. 8), in that Buba Sesay provides retrospective and selective insights into his experiences and knowledges of the situation under consideration. At the same time, however, they concede that Buba Sesay’s contributions did not adhere to the criteria of conventional auto-ethnographic data collection (ibid., p. 8). In this way, these two authors, very similar to Lees and Robinson, make a double movement by creating space to bear witness (cf. also p. 3) and thus, in Fricker’s words, enabling epistemic justice in the form of testimonial justice, but at the same time also filling an epistemic gap:

“Thus, the authors, through the interweaving of Buba's first-hand insights with Sarah's field work data, both refer to the same situation and/or same persons from different points of views. Thereby, a “wider lens on the world” (p. 275) is opened up, which also helps to understand individuals’ influences on our experiences and interpretations” (Nimführ and Sesay, 2019: 8).

The perspective of the non-academic part of the author duo therefore also serves to relativise the insights gained using ethnographic methods – not as contrasting experiences, but as different perspectives on the matter of subject. The inclusion of research partners in such formats involves a change in their positioning; they are presented to the scientific community not as research subjects but as researchers and knowers.

This approach also underlies a monograph on illegalised migration published by a collective of two anthropologists and two undocumented migrants in the United States of America (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019). Based on a critique of the colonial tradition of anthropology and the ‘narrow confines of academia and its normative limits on what counts as legitimate scholarly work’ (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019: 1), this monograph reflects a years-long collaborative research process by a team of ‘activist-researchers’ who, as they write, ‘embarked on an ethnographic project to learn what they could about undocumented workers and, in the process, learned something about ethnography itself’ (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019: 12). As a result, the book ultimately deals with two intertwined topics: it explores the effects of the securitisation of immigration on undocumented people in the United States based on ethnographic research in a New Jersey town between 2011 and 2015, while on the other hand, it reflects the collaborative research process that was set in motion to address this research interest and as such became a subject of investigation itself.

In terms of form, various text formats come together here – from larger sections of traditional ethnography and theoretical and methodological reflection to storytelling field notes by one of the authors, songs written by another and a jointly written theatre piece. This prismatic character of the overall text (especially from p. 101 onwards) takes into account the fact that an openness to different forms of knowledge must also find appropriate expression. What’s more, the authors see the need not only to integrate more diverse authorships, but also to reach more diverse readerships; ‘publics’, as they write, ‘that include anthropological subjects themselves’ (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019: 8).

The work of Alonso Bejerano et al. resembles in many aspects that of Colectivo Situaciones presented above in that it wishes to free researchers from academic conventions in order to ‘join with those in struggle’ (ibid., p. 9) and to allow for an ‘anti-objectivist’ ‘learning from others’ rather than ‘learning about them’ (ibid., p. 8). In contrast to the Colectivo Situaciones, Alonso Bejerano et al. do not renounce the academic project; rather, they intend to open it up and extend it to their epistemic partners to share its power:

“Ethnographic research, its instruments and methods, can be used not only by professional scholars to study subordinated peoples. Ethnography can be a tool of self-knowledge for the marginalized, and by enabling them to better understand and articulate their condition, it can contribute to popular struggles for liberation. Coincidentally, such an approach can lead to better, richer ethnographic data, emerging from the engaged and embodied participation of local collaborators in the research process (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019: 9).

As in all of the texts presented, writing together is intended to serve both ways: filling knowledge gaps with more perspectives and sharing academic authority to enhance the cause of the research partners. In this case this also implies giving the two non-academic authors an opportunity for ‘asserting their right to think freely, to speak publicly, and to exist in the United States’ (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019: xii). However, this project goes further than those above presented, as the two non-academic research partners became systematically involved in such a way that they, according to the authors, went from ‘never having heard of anthropology or ethnography before’ to in the end being ‘full-fledged ethnographers’ (Alonso Bejarano et al., 2019: 10,13). This means that we are not only dealing here with an epistemic repositioning of the research partners through joint writing, but that joint writing follows a far-reaching repositioning of the research partners during the research process.

Another example is an article written by Simon Down and Michael Hughes and published in an anthology about organisational ethnography. The article aims to explore the ‘difference it makes when ethnographic “subjects” speak for themselves’ (Down and Hughes, 2009: 83). In terms of form, these two authors opt for an outline in which a fully jointly-produced auto-ethnographic section on Hughes’ experiences of going through a corporate cultural change programme as a worker in a coke-making plant is framed by an introduction and conclusion written by the business economist Simon Down and commented on by the co-author, in which Down reflects on the implications of such collaborative writing in ethnography. With regard to this textual arrangement, Down formulates in the introductory reflection what I believe to be an essential insight for collaborative writing:

“Any piece of jointly authored academic writing will have a mixture of co-produced and singly authored content; this chapter is no different: co-production does not require or specify equality or the proportionality of inputs. (Down and Hughes, 2009: 83-84).

Similar to the other texts presented, this essay is based on a critique of scholarly authority and the claim of generalisation in academia. For the specific case of organisational ethnography, the authors criticise the undervaluation of ‘rich empiric tales (…) favouring muscular theoreticality over particular experience and emotional response’ (Down and Hughes, 2009: 86). Like Lees and Robinson, Down and Hughes highlight the importance of such co-production in creating space for emotionality, as well as for the evaluations and perspectives of the non-academic research partners, without subjecting them to academic theories or analysing them for ‘hidden meanings’ (Down and Hughes, 2009: 84).

“Academic discourses tend to want to resolve the contradictory plurality of lived and storied experience. Fully co-produced accounts like ‘Michael’s story’ have an unresolved quality that is resistant to the rationalizing intent of ‘preconceived theoretical space’” (Down and Hughes, 2009: 95).

While the Colectivo Situaciones turns away from academia in order to think and write collectively with its non-academic partners on their own terms and Alonso Bejerano et al., on the other hand, attempt to extend academic anthropology so that it works for their non-academic partners and integrates their knowledge, Down and Hughes explicitly decide to let the two stand side by side. This also includes their different agendas: Down’s scholarly agenda and Hughes’ interest in building his career in the steelworks, which make publishing articles and influencing academic debates a minor interest to Hughes (Down and Hughes, 2009: 89). Down also refers to the provinciality of academic thinking from the perspective of his research partner:

“For Michael the academic work he saw at the conference ‘didn’t seem all that interesting’. This is because the things that the academic community currently finds authentic and interesting are different from what Michael thinks is important and authentic.” (Down and Hughes, 2009: 95).

In fact, this “unresolved quality”, as argued by Down and Hughes, characterises all the texts presented. They give space to the expression of knowledge that is not bound by the rules of academic knowledge production and refrain from later subsuming it to their own interpretations. At the same time, all texts, with the exception of Colectivo Situaciones, refer to the state of research and controlled methods of qualitative research. The perspectives of the co-authors do not substitute the academic lenses, but are complementary to them; they are so, however, as equally weighted knowledges and not as subordinate experiences. It is certainly no coincidence that almost all of the examples are based on ethnographic work, as ethnography as an epistemology is particularly interested in particularity, diversity and the knowledge embedded in the lifeworlds studied (Herbert, 2000). The difference between the examples presented here and conventional ethnographies, however, lies in a repositioning of the research subjects as knowers, who have their own valid, relevant and non-subsumable perspectives to contribute. In this way, the authors realise the project of located, situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988) in their texts: intertwining diverse, reflexive perspectives without displacing one by the other, but rather placing them in communication with each other (cp. Pratt, 2010: 46ff.).

Bawaka Country et al. (2016) go one step further by including a non-human agent in their writing collective, thereby also transcending the concept of the “field” earlier problematized in this article. In ‘Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a relational understanding of place/space’ three academic geographers, a research assistant and five non-academic indigenous authors write together with Bawaka, an Indigenous Homeland in northern Australia (for similar approaches cf: Darug Ngurra et al., 2019; tebrakunna country & Lee, 2019). Bawaka, which takes the role of the lead author is presented as the central ‘author-ity’ of the article (456), which the collective reasons by saying that it ‘enabled our learning, our meeting, the stories that guide us, the connections we discuss and has, indeed, brought us into being, as we are, and continue to co-become, today’ (456). Although in this article we find few explicit references to the concrete form of the writing collaboration (for more details on the practical challenges of this type of collaborative writing, see Bawaka Country et al., 2018), we are informed that the academic authors took it upon themselves to bring the shared thoughts into the specific text form. Thus, even though the act of putting words to paper was not collaborative, the article still serves as an impressive example of how alternative forms of knowledge and academic writing can come together. On the one hand, we learn something about a very long-lasting collaboration based on a very strong personal involvement – the authors call it ‘adoption into a family’ (456) – as we have already read in the other examples. More crucial to the specific contribution, however, is the way the argument is developed and presented through the collaborative work of digging for ganguri, a root plant. Using a distinctive narrative style that continuously references everyday knowledge, practices, and indigenous ontologies, readers are introduced to a way of thinking that transcends the separation between the empirical and theoretical, as well as between subject and context. As they write themselves:

“This paper is written as an Indigenous/non-Indigenous, human/more-than-human co-construction of knowledge, not an ethnography. We see this as a major contribution of our work. We work together to challenge notions of separate Indigenous and non-Indigenous, academic and non-academic knowledges, and human and more-than-human worlds (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 457).

Like the previous examples, this work also features an unconventional writing style. Although it is less polyphonic than the earlier examples, it still weaves together different modes of argumentation and narration. For instance, a more traditional discussion of the state of research is combined with reflections drawn from everyday indigenous cosmologies. The authors also problematise the associated translation difficulties:

“This is difficult to convey in words, in writing, and particularly in English. The ways that places/spaces and beings co-become, after all, are so wildly diverse, more-than-human, more-than-words, more-than-thought, more-than-feeling, more than-dream. (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 458).

What becomes particularly clear here is the translation work that underlies such collaborations, which cannot stop at making the knowledge from the ‘field’ tangible for the academic reader, but also requires the academic reader to open up and learn new ways of speaking and seeing.

At this juncture I conclude the discussion, not without having mentioned the special case of the highly acclaimed collective writing project ‘Playing with Fire’ by the Sangtin Writers Collective and Richa Nagar (Sangtin Writers and Nagar, 2006). This project delves into the work of female NGO grassroots workers in the Indian Development sector. It stands apart from the examples previously discussed, as it emerged from the grassroots workers’ own initiative, embodying a hybrid nature by entering scholarly discourse through a complex interplay of grassroots and academic engagement. Richa Nagar, a US-based academic, decisively supported the writing process and produced the English translation. Framed by an academic introduction and postscript, and a foreword by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, this collective grassroots effort was presented to the English-speaking academic community, sharing epistemic authority to recommend it as valuable knowledge production. Functioning similarly to the other examples here, the book combines diverse narratives and is framed by academic reflections on methodology in its English translation. However, akin to the Colectivo Situaciones, it did not primarily evolve as an academic project. Nonetheless, Nagar’s reflections on this writing project (Nagar, 2013, 2014) offer valuable insights for academic endeavours, which I will explore further in the following section.

With the help of the examples presented, it should have become clear by now that joint writing with non-academic epistemic partners holds a double benefit, namely a richer, more multi-layered knowledge perspective as well as the creation of more epistemic justice. Each of the publishing formats used for this purpose brings with it possibilities and restrictions. As different as these formats may be, a number of common typical challenges and success factors can nevertheless be identified in the attempts to write together. In the following, I would like to draw some conclusions from the texts presented as well as from my own experience.

III Strategies for writing together

What all the collaborative writing projects presented here have in common is their exploration of the limits of academic knowledge production in favour of embracing the insights of people traditionally not recognised as knowledge actors. Sharing epistemic authority as academics, however, means starting from a gatekeeping position and, no matter how much authority is shared and at what point of the process, most likely the academic is going to remain in this position. Under what circumstances can we transform our ineluctable position as gatekeepers into that of mediators? As I will argue in the following, the quality of the relationship with our research partners and a sustainable handling of the trust placed in us is crucial for this. Writing with research partners resembles any other participatory research process; it is, however, noteworthy to specify the typical requirements for this usually neglected phase of collaboration that holds its own specific challenges. In the following, I am going to present three central strategies for successful collaborative writing and how these can help further decolonise the discipline, leading to more just and richer geographical research.

In addition to the literature review, these strategies are informed by my own experience with a collaborative writing project. Building on a study of the social production of spaces of asylum, I co-authored an article on the housing situation of refugees in Germany with one of my study participants. Soliana Hannes (a pseudonym she chose for this purpose) was one of my refugee partners during the 3 years of the study, during which I accompanied her in various activities. Eventually, we decided to write an article together (Blank and Hannes, 2021). While I have reflected on this writing collaboration in detail elsewhere (Blank, 2023), it guides my selection of writing strategies here.

1 Creating a writing relationship and negotiating positionality

Writing with research partners requires the establishment of a writing relationship. Ultimately, this is always an unfinished and imperfect process of negotiation. Writing relationships are not only embedded in specific (research) contexts but are also fundamentally shaped by the different social positions of the participants. The writing partners are usually integrated into social power structures in different ways, which can be associated with privileges and discrimination that have an impact on the joint production of knowledge. The question is how the relationship-building can then be adapted to the specific situation in order to counteract the power effects of the different positions.

As we know from all participatory research, this inclusion of research partners into studies is far from being a neat process. Existing hierarchies often render participatory research practices far more unidirectional than originally intended by the researcher. The stage and roles are often set up beforehand (Kothari, 2001: 149), research relationships tend to cross postcolonial power relationships (e.g. Castleden et al., 2012; Nasser-Eddin and Abu-Assab, 2020), the partners rarely share the educational background or resources of the researchers and academics themselves are far from being autonomous decision-makers, but are conditioned and curtailed by the rules of the academic endeavour (Mountz et al., 2015; The SIGJ2 Writing Collective, 2012).

However, positionalities are not limited to fixed characteristics, but are negotiated, set and broken in everyday contact (Browne et al., 2010: 588; Haraway, 1988: 588). Both we and our research partners change during the processes. This is most clearly demonstrated in the above examples of Alonso Bejarano et al. and the Bawaka Collective (cp. also Nyaba and Paganini, 2023). Most often, these negotiations and changes are characterised by small shifts and nuances and, above all, constant mutual reassurance during the joint work. As Nagar writes with regard to collaborative feminist storytelling:

“(…) co-authoring stories in alliance work demands radical vulnerability from those who inhabit different communities of meaning, whether academia, activism, or elsewhere. If feminist alliance work is to realize its transformative possibilities, collaborators must recognize each other as co-authors joined in relations of affect, trust, imagination, and critique, ever open to interrogation by one another, and willing to forego the putative superiority of their protocols of understanding and sites of knowledge making (Nagar, 2013: 13).

Developing trustful research relationships is one of the central success factors of collaborative writing projects. As Nagar writes elsewhere:

“Committed alliance work is about building multifaceted relationships through trust; it is about how and where we stand with one another when it comes to co-authoring ideas and struggles; it is about how we engage difference, disagreements, mistakes, and dissonance (Nagar, 2013: 8).

Moreover, in contexts like the ones presented in the section above, in which texts are written with especially vulnerable research partners (cp. Butcher, 2022), writing together also involves being compassionate, caring and taking responsibility (Evans, 2016).

In most of the texts presented in the former section, the relationship between the research partners developed into quite intimate ones during the process. The Colectivo Situaciones, for example, writes that they see their own form of militant investigation as strongly influenced by the unifying concepts of friendship and love (Colectivo Situaciones and MTD De Solano, 2002: 15-17). Similarly, Lees and Robinson contend: ‘Key in ethnographic biography is the relationship and collaboration between the individual and their biographer. In this case, we became good friends’ (Lees and Robinson, 2021: 595). And the Bawaka-Collective even speaks about ‘adoption into a family’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 456). A central success factor of all of these writing projects therefore seems to have been a relationship that transcended formal agreements as usually recommend by ethic guidelines (cp. Castleden et al., 2012) and encompassed elements of friendship and intimacy (Moss and Donovan, 2017). This also corresponds to my own experience, in which the research relationship with my research partner only developed into a joint writing project on the basis of a long-lasting, trusting collaboration. At the same time, the joint writing process then became the catalyst for a further deepening of this relationship, which developed into a friendship that went far beyond the research process.

Not all research projects are suited to this kind of intimacy, and it is important as researchers to maintain personal boundaries in stressful contexts (Drozdzewski and Dominey-Howes, 2022; Taylor, 2019). However, we should emphasise and recognise ‘going native’ as a strength of research work much more than has been the case so far. This should also include professionalising our reflection on our own involvement. In my own research project, I benefited from a professional coaching programme developed for my research. The coach helped me to reflect on my positionality in the writing relationship and the contradictions between my demands and the actual writing process. Such support does not have to come from outside, but I believe that every collaborative writing project benefits from well-considered and routine reflection practices, which – unlike in my own case – should be available to all partners involved.

2 Spending time, respecting other urgencies, and sharing resources

Collaborative writing is not a singular act but a comprehensive process (Nagar, 2013: 8), and this process takes time. All of the examples presented above were based on long lead-ups of relationship-building within field research and the subsequent formation of a writing relationship. Moreover, academic publishing is a complicated, long, tedious endeavour. It thus depends on corresponding time resources of all the writing partners involved. Time that is not normally given either in academia or in the everyday life of our research partners.

In academia, this problem has been discussed for some time under buzzwords such as ‘slow science’ or ‘slow scholarship’ (Berg and Seeber, 2016; Mountz et al., 2015; Stengers, 2018). Many of the considerations made in these debates are to be further radicalised for participatory research, for a decolonisation of science cannot structurally keep up with the usual pacing of the scientific enterprise (Castleden et al., 2012; Malone, 2020).

The establishment of such long-term working relationships, however, also depends considerably on our research partners, whose time resources are often even more limited and whose patience for such processes can also be quickly overstretched. Research partners may value contributing their knowledge but have no interest in the specific academic research process and outcome (Castleden et al., 2012: 170-171), they may live to completely different timescales (Tipa et al., 2009: 102), and they may lack the time and other resources to participate (Malone, 2020; McAdam-Otto and Kaufmann, 2023). It is well established that research partners most often have different urgencies than the researcher (e.g. Mitchell and Draper, 1982: 4). This is all the more true for research partners in life contexts as exceptional as homelessness or illegalisation (cp. Butcher, 2022). Getting access to basic rights, such as the right to remain, adequate and affordable housing or work and education can take up a great part of the everyday lives of our writing partners. It affects the priorities of the research partners and, above all, the time and energy at hand for projects such as writing an article. Finally, as especially indigenous research shows, research partners may live to different time/spaces including different concepts of time and timescales (Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Tipa et al., 2009). It is therefore important to agree on timetables for such writing projects that connect the different temporalities and urgencies with each other.

However, appropriate resources are also required, which must be taken into account when setting up such projects. On the one hand, this includes letting go of the practice of including our informants in our studies free of charge as a matter of course. Notably, in some research fields, there is already a practice of compensating non-academic research partners (Castleden et al., 2012: 169), while in many other areas this is not yet common. Traditionally, then, the privilege of utilising the knowledge and experiences of our collaborators has depended on their unpaid labour. However, this work is typically a paid activity in academia. This does not only highlight an existing disparity in the recognition and compensation of contributions from non-academic partners, but also means that collaborative writing can be enforced by academics donating their working time to their research partners to create time for joint writing. This donation of time can take on different forms such as producing knowledge not suited for academic utilisation (cf. Tipa et al., 2009: 102). As Nagar explains:

“Writing through academic spaces allows us to push the predefined assumptions and boundaries of what is legitimized as important knowledge. It also allows research funds to be utilized for enabling practices that seek to redefine expert knowledge. This further implies that for significant chunks of time academics in political alliances might produce knowledges for audiences outside of the university (Nagar, 2013: 10).

My own collaborative writing project involved helping my research partner with everyday challenges, such as moving the house or studying for an exam (Blank, 2023: 178). From digging for a root plant (Bawaka Country et al., 2016) to studying for a biology exam, writing can encompass much more than the usual academic writing practice, which is why collaborative writing projects may require us to engage in much broader processes and concepts of writing.

3 Finding a common language, breaking conventions, and challenging standards

Collaborative writing does not only require a collegial exchange of ideas. Rather, a common language must be worked out and developed in the course. In a text on participatory action research, Ulrich Oslender quotes Gustavo Esteva with the insight that the dissolution of the subject/object relationship in research processes also requires ‘unlearning the language of domination’ (Oslender, 2015: 67). With regard to publishing together, as we have seen in the examples, unlearning the language of domination in practice means letting go of academic concepts such as generalisation or theoretisation and making space for anti-objectivist, radical subjective or explicitly experience-based perspectives as well as for emotions, values, and unconventional framing and methods. In fact, all of this has long been introduced to geography and ethnography (Cameron, 2012; Jazeel and McFarlane, 2010) and geography has developed a sensitivity for alternative cosmologies (Coombes et al., 2014; Panelli, 2010). However, in writing together these theoretical insights must not only be put into practice, but must be integrated into a joint writing practice on an equal footing, in which alternative knowledges are not the object of study but become part of the text for which all of the authors involved are responsible.

As we have seen in the above section, the central tool for this unlearning the language of domination is the unlearning of our accustomed text forms. Text design is a crucial part of knowledge production; form and content are directly related to each other (St Pierre, 2007). How can the voices be woven together in a way that does justice to the joint authorship? How to give place to both general information and particular experiences within it without privileging expertise over experience, theory over practice, the general over the particular or vice versa? As we have seen in the examples presented above, this can take on very different forms, from interviews and printed conversations as used by the Colectivo Situaciones to more kaleidoscopic/prismatic arrangements of different forms of expression as presented by Alonso Bejarano et al. (see also Hochrein et al., 2023) or the side-by-side-variant of Down and Hughes. In most publications, we will find a mixture of passages in which writing is done with a common voice and in which different voices are made visible. For authors this means to let go of the idea of speaking with one unambiguous voice (cp. Brigstocke 2023; Moreira and Diversi, 2014; Mountz et al., 2003) and of producing a completely closed text. For editors this means letting go of proven guidelines, as specifications on the structure and style of contributions are a typical stumbling block when it comes to alternative knowledge production. For many types of publication, however, it also means adapting peer review procedures and providing peers with correspondingly adapted criteria for their reviews (Cameron, 2012; Nimführ and Blank, 2023: 15-16).

For my own collaborative writing project, we used the request for a contribution to an edited volume that was explicitly aimed at a broader public. Such broader forums can be a good way of circumventing academic barriers and producing transformative knowledge. However, we should not tire of submitting our research collaborations to high-ranking peer-reviewed journals, thus giving this kind of knowledge the chance to enter the canon of the discipline and thereby challenging not only the everyday standard practices but also the underlying concepts of academic quality.

IV Conclusion

Based on an interdisciplinary literature review, I have argued that writing with our research partners holds a double benefit, namely, a richer, more multi-layered knowledge perspective on the one hand and the creation of more epistemic justice on the other. As we have seen from examples provided, this kind of research writing will most of the time have an ‘unresolved quality’ (Down and Hughes, 2009: 95), insofar as the texts give space to the expression of knowledge that is not bound by the rules of academic knowledge production, doing so without subsuming it subsequently to interpretations by the academic researcher. The perspectives of the co-authors do not substitute the academic lenses – in fact most of the texts also refer to the state of research and controlled methods of qualitative research – but are complementary to them. They are so, however, as equally weighted knowledges and not as subordinate experiences. To this end, I have argued, it is necessary to transform the ineluctable position of the academic as a gatekeeper into that of a mediator by creating meaningful writing relationships based on trust, time, the exchange of resources and a breaking with academic conventions.

Collaborative writing is far from being an ideal type of decolonial research practice. As researchers we do not stand outside the power relations embedded in academia and, usually, we do not possess the means to change the game fundamentally. More than that, the examples of collaborative writing provided suggest that these writing processes can actively benefit from the distinct contributions that academic expertise provides – be it through conceptual framing, theoretical synthesis, or methodological structuring. This does not however relieve us from reflecting on and criticising our methodological approaches and trying to do the best that we can to minimise the reproduction of power relations in research. Decolonial knowledge production in academic contexts does not function as ‘all or nothing’, but rather as ‘more in addition’ – a process of expanding epistemic space while rethinking established practices. Not all research interests lend themselves to collaborative writing, as this very article illustrates – my former writing partner had no interest in co-authoring, and the text itself is grounded in a scholarly practice that deliberately abstracts from the field rather than being embedded within it. Moreover, as the examples have shown, collaborative writing is, above all, a communicative practice and a relational process, but not every such research relationship must or can naturally evolve into co-writing. Collaborative writing is only one of many ways in which academic writing can be shaped by engagement with non-academic constituencies. Encounters in the field, dialogues, and collaborative research processes all contribute to how we frame our questions, interpret data, and write about our findings. The key challenge is thus not simply whether we write together, but how we acknowledge and integrate the knowledges of our research partners in ways that avoid epistemic extraction and foster meaningful exchange. At the same time, we need to accept the incompleteness of our means to do non-hierarchical research in situations of complex power relations (cp. Abu-Lughod, 1993: 22), while simultaneously developing a programme of small steps that enables us to do things differently and encourages us to reflect self-critically on our methods in order to advance them continuously. To this end, I have presented some leading examples and distilled three key strategies for fostering meaningful writing partnerships beyond academia based on these examples.

However, the academic researcher is by no means the only gatekeeper. Editors, publishers, reviewers, and readers decide about the epistemic value of a text and thereby determine whether it finds its way into the knowledge corpus at all. So, if epistemic authority lies in the academic institutions, how far may alternative knowledge production deviate from the academic mainstream without moving to the outermost margins in the ‘ranking of knowledges’ (Sibley, 1995: 122), which is not only influenced by the specific rules and habits of academic writing (St Pierre, 2007: 5304) but further intensified by metrics that determine whether a publication counts as noteworthy or not (Dufty-Jones and Gibson, 2022: 340; The SIGJ2 Writing Collective, 2012)? Sharing epistemic authority risks losing it altogether. In a presentation on my own writing collaboration at a conference, an experienced colleague clearly stated: ‘Caution! Think of your own academic career, this won’t get you anywhere’. This argument is recurrent in discussions on participatory research (e.g. Benford, 2015; Castleden et al., 2012: 171). So long as academia does not make inclusiveness a real standard, including voices usually excluded from dissemination of academic knowledge will remain structurally difficult and highly selective (Malone, 2020). At the same time, it is through little steps and openings that institutions and structures change. Thus, more courage is needed for incomplete attempts. And the claim to open up spaces for participation is universal, but their use remains the decision of the research partners. Engaging in writing collaborations with our epistemic partners, I have argued, may be one way to realise such an opening, fostering more plural knowledges and advancing epistemic justice in geographical research.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank the editor and the referees for their valuable and insightful comments, which have significantly strengthened this manuscript. I truly appreciate the constructive feedback and the support throughout the revision process.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Martina Blank

Author biography

Martina Blank holds a Visiting Professorship in the Department of Human Geography at Goethe University Frankfurt, where her current work explores the intersections of migration and urban transformation, with a particular emphasis on qualitative and ethnographic methods.

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