10:30 - 10:45
Co-authorship and collaborative writing are activities that span feminist activism and practice, including and beyond academic spaces. This can include traditional academic outputs such as papers, books and chapters, though might also extend to plays, manifestos and zines. This talk reflects on my personal experiences of co-designing, co-writing, and co-delivering a creative methods workshop series with Inspire, a women’s wellbeing organisation based in Oldham, UK. I argue that co-writing and collaborative creations offer relational spaces of friendship and mutuality and can reflect a prefigurative politics of doing academia differently.
Our methods series, one of several co-produced activities and outputs from our years working together, was intended to extend our collaboration, create learning opportunities, and to capacity-build community researchers and volunteers. Crafting the series, from ideas to delivery and evaluation, revealed much to me about the creeping neoliberalisation of academia. Expectations around pace, products and performativity, however, were soon eclipsed by a renewed focused on joy, trust and companionship. I will share in my talk examples of how we embedded this ethos into all elements of the series, including in how we delivered the sessions, our choice of venue, and in follow-up activities. I close by sharing our ongoing plans of co-investment between Inspire and my team, and how collaborative future-making can provide important spaces of hope and solidarity in the research community.
10:45 - 11:00
We met a decade ago in Manila, almost by accident, introduced by a mutual friend over a social meal. Vanessa was teaching in Theatre Arts at the University of the Philippines Diliman, having been trained in Performance Studies at NYU. Gerry had come with Caleb Johnston, May Farrales and 5 Canadian theatre artists to collaborate with PETA Theater Center to present their testimonial play. In this presentation we trace our many collaborations since this chance meeting. We have collaborated across our many differences: Filipino/Canadian; student/supervisor; competency in Tagalog (and not); different knowledges and networks, such that mentorship has been mobile, mutual and indeterminate. Our collaborations are rooted in the doing-ness of research, in the doing of a PhD and doing field research together. Our research practice troubles the boundaries between field research, scripts, performances and writing. We focus here on two collaborative research projects: one in Manila, to create a new version of Johnston and Pratt’s testimonial play, and another in Vancouver documenting the experiences of migrants and seafarers during COVID-19 restrictions. We consider the companionship of working out challenges together, and seizing and sharing opportunities for researching, writing and theorising. We ask: what keeps a collaboration going, and where might our collaboration go?
Banta, V. and Pratt, G. (2023) Immobilised by the pandemic: Filipino domestic workers and seafarers in the time of COVID-19 Transactions of the IBG 48(3), pp.556-570.
Pratt, G., Johnston C. and Banta V. (2017) 'A Travelling Script: Labor Migration, Precarity and Performance' TDR The Drama Review 61(2) pp. 48-70.
Pratt, G., Johnston C and Banta V. (2017) 'Life-times of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio, Manila' Antipode, 49(1), pp.169-192.
11:00 - 11:15
Knowledge is not something produced in isolation, from a brilliant mind, and in an unidentified place. The feminist thought insists that different types of knowledge are embodied and produced in relationships, permeated by different positions of privilege and oppression. The knowledge produced in the university system, which has become increasingly privatized and neoliberal, has been transformed into invaluable goods owned by certain economic groups. Epistemic extractivism has also become a common practice in intellectual production processes. Despite producing together certain types of knowledge, people obtain different results in the transformation of ideas into economic capital, academic prestige, and symbolic capital. Building up strict, decent, and honest relationships concerning knowledge production results involves a constant exercise of dialogue and flexible agreements, which are transformed over time. In this reflection, we present a trajectory of nineteen years of joint production of knowledge developed by an activist, travesti, sex professional, and a university professor who also became an activist. We evidence the challenges we have faced and the strategies we developed to keep our academic/activist objectives from distinct positions regarding privileges and power. In addition, we describe our effort in the construction of a relational space, filled with emotions and mutual aid, which produces comfort and resistance, but also conflicts and divergences for both of us.
Butler, Judith. (2004) Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. London, New York: Verso.
Massey, Doreen. (2005) For space. London: Sage.
Rose, Gillian. (1993) Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Silva, Joseli Maria; Ornat, Marcio Jose. (2016) Transfeminism and Decolonial Thought: The Contribution of Brazilian Travestis. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(1–2): 220 – 227.
11:15 - 11:30
Co-authoring feminist geographies is a deliberate praxis. In-between being a “slow(er) form of scholarship and a way of sharing workloads, the practice of co-authoring is also a tool for countering hegemonic narratives, writing against power relations of violence and encouraging a worldling of feminist geographies (Nagar 2013, Muller 2021). The paper emphasises this understudied yet provocative aspect of co-authoring. For feminist geographers, the practice of co-authoring can potentially transform the way in which they do, think, talk and write geography.
The paper discusses the author’s learnings from co-authoring feminist geographies with colleagues in/across three ‘different worlds’ – (1) locally, within the academy while working across ‘cultural differences’ (2) globally, with colleagues in international networks set across ‘political boundaries’, and, (3) persons situated outside/beyond the academy. Using an autoethnographic framework, the paper attempts to investigate how similar strategies of writing together deployed in the contexts above, playout differently across space and time.
Further, within the three different worlds of the author, co-authoring is seen to blur boundaries of gender, region, and race to advance geographical knowledge that is relatively wholistic, inclusive and considers multiple perspectives. Co-authoring strategies are also contingent upon the author’s positionalities shaped by being an early career researcher, a woman of colour, a person from a mixed-cultural family, a member of a cultural and religious minority community in India and a feminist geographer. These aspects of co-authoring underscore it's reflexive nature and reveal the possibilities of using ‘difference’ differently (Muflicha and Mackinlay 2020).
Muflichah, S. and Mackinlay, E. (2020) 'Writing a global and Southern sisterhood between Indonesia and Australia: The possibilities of “difference” and collaborative autoethnography', Journal of International Women's Studies, 21(2), pp. 185-197
Müller, M. (2021). 'Worlding geography: From linguistic privilege to decolonial anywheres', Progress in Human Geography, 45(6), pp.1440-1466.
Nagar, R.(2013). 'Storytelling and co-authorship in feminist alliance work: reflections from a journey', Gender, Place & Culture, 20(1), pp.1-18.