Collaborative poaching: Compossibilities, notes, traces and narrative imagination

This article suggests a method for cultivating a collaborative method of shared visual note-taking on seminar readings and discussions, built on the method of creative ‘poaching’ of each other’s contributions, using pencil and simple tracing technique on transparent papers. The method was developed and tested in a decade of workshops with the author and varying groups of participants, students, researchers and professionals, in academic text-based discussions, lectures and seminars. The method, speculative and collaborative, aims to assemble the participants’ ideas and contributions in compossible ways, that is, possibilities that support each other to build more convivial forms of annotation and idea generation, and where contributions flow into each other and with no clear delineation of order or between authors/contributors. This method of collaborative poaching produced convincing results and could be used as an exercise in semi-structured discussions and their creative documentation, cultivating a multiplicity of perspectives on human values and also support what Martha Nussbaum calls a ‘narrative imagination’.