On Collaboration and Knowledge

Over the past decade or so, there has been much enthusiasm for collaborative work in the humanities and social sciences. As a way of doing research, collaboration has been a more common practice in the social sciences than in the humanities for some time, but in neither is it as generally assumed or as highly valued as it is in the natural and physical sciences. Since 1970, for example, over sixty per cent of Nobel prizes in chemistry, medicine, and physics have been awarded to two or three individuals for one project (see Hafernik, Messerschmitt, and Vandrick 31). The rhetoric that accompanies the enthusiasm would seem on the face of it to fit more obviously with the studies colloquially understood as "soft sciences" than with the "hard sciences" and their emphasis on empirical, quantifiable, objective data. Johnnie Hafernik, Dorothy Messerschmitt, and Stephanie Vandrick, reviewing the literature on collaboration, observe that collaborative research has been characterized by others as "relational," "dialogic," "open-ended," "multi-voiced," and as "giving expression and authority to marginalized voices" (33), to which they add their own endorsements of the experiences of the "builtin support system for the researchers," "the multiple perspectives that collaborative work provides," the stimulation and excitement of group work, and the ability to "tackl[e] more complex projects than individuals might choose" (34–35). Sarah Robbins and Maribeth Cooper recount their nine-year collaboration as English educators working in the different locations of school and university, and conclude that this collaboration has allowed them to "examine critically and continually the material conditions of their institutional cultures" and to create "'habitable spaces' for communal reform" (241–42). For Martin Sanders, collaborative research is not only more ethical, but also "more enjoyable, more inspiring, and more productive" than individual research. In the Presidential Forum she convened at the Modern Languages Association congress of 2000, and later introduced in Profession, Linda Hutcheon encapsulates the value of collaboration in her title as a "creative" response to the fact of an "adversarial academy" (4).

As Hutcheon's title suggests, the conventions of the academy are not easily adaptable to collaborative work. The credentialling systems of universities—degrees, hiring, tenure, and promotion—for the most part remain firmly embedded in what has been called "agonistic individualism" (Lunsford, Ede, and Arraez 12) or, more colourfully, "the solitary-hunter paradigm" (Sanders). For that reason, collaboration raises issues of ownership and concerns with matters like plagiarism and the fair attribution of individual contributions. According to Hafernik, Messerschmitt, and Vandrick, "any attempt to separate the individual contributions of each author completely contradicts the essence and spirit of collaboration" (32). And yet, much academic collaboration does not assume equal contributions or shared leadership at all, but rather is based on a hierarchical model in which graduate students do much of the investigative or experimental work for a lead researcher who receives most of the academic capital. In these instances, collaboration is easily appropriated to the existing structures of the adversarial academy, with such collaboration understood in the language of granting councils as the "training of highly qualified personnel" or the "building of research capacity." Rather than creating the habitable spaces to which Robbins and Cooper refer, the recent valuation of collaboration may, then, merely demonstrate the adeptness of contemporary universities and their researchers to "fit themselves to the needs of agile capitalism," in Christine Bold's words (6). For many academic researchers, collaboration in this sense no doubt would approach the specific meaning of the word as traitorous co-operation with the enemy.

But, satisfying as such a conclusion might be, it does not account fully for what is at stake in the struggle to identify new paradigms of research. In Canada, this struggle has coalesced around the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) since its announcement in 2004 of a framework for consultation with its communities on a strategy for "transformation." In the first published account of the context for SSHRC's rethinking of its functions, then-President Marc Renaud described a fundamental difference between the academic work of the 1970s and that of the 2000s:

In the academic...