On Collaboration and Communication "In the Now"

Abstract

We are three scholars, situated in different disciplines, institutions, and geographies, who have built relationships with one another through our research in Accra, Ghana. In this editorial, we reflect on our ways of relating, supporting, and learning from one another as a starting point to consider the journal’s new section, “In the Now.” We coauthored this editorial through a process of engaging together in a virtual conversation, followed by a collec-tive transcription for focus and clarity, and then an incorporation of editors’ comments via revision and resubmission. Our attempt through this mode of conversation is to preserve our perspectives and voices, to acknowledge our positionalities, and to enact our commitment to research coproduction and scholarly collaboration and exchange, which are fundamental to our work. We here differentiate among coauthorship (our practice of conversing and writing together to produce a piece of academic scholarship), collaboration (which generates socially relevant knowledge by bridging scholarship to wider society and including the participation of diverse social actors and forms of knowledge), and coproduction (the inclusion of research partici-pants as active decision-makers throughout the research process, as in set-ting research design, producing data, analyzing, and disseminating research learnings) (Phillips et al. 2012). We reflect critically on the limitations of traditional scholarly forms and consider more flexible, open, and accountable approaches to scholarship, drawing on our own experiences and practices. In doing so, we wish to think about how an approach to scholarship rooted in care might inform the way we respond to this moment, in terms of the challenges wrought by the pandemic and the renewed calls to address elit-ism, epistemic and structural violence, and racial inequality in the academy.