Collaborative Knowledge Production: Ideals and practices in a neo-liberal era

In this article, the author reflects on the conditions for working with collaborative research in current academic settings. On the basis of reflections on goals, challenges and results of earlier projects, the author looks into how economic and political shifts and transformations in work have changed the conditions for shared knowledge production with the institutionalization of neo-liberal discourse of the knowledge economy as managerial regimes. She questions if context-specific enactments of the discourse of participation can be handled, when neoliberal managerial regimes guide research activities and other working practices and the identities of academics and other professionals who are inscribed as subjects in these regimes. The conclusion is, that we have to look for cracks in the wall and insist on collaborative research because it is it the process of “being in relation that forms the basis for learning and understanding more about others, ourselves and our world” (Harrison, MacGibbon & Morten, 2001;342).