Becoming ourselves through collaborative inquiry - difference, knowledge production

As an international group of five researchers we have been exploring possibilities of collaborative inquiry for more than four years. We discuss epistemological and ethical consequences of producing knowledge collaboratively through dialogue. We draw mainly on Bakhtinian conception of dialogism and poststructuralist thinking. Our dialogue began on the occasion of a cultural studies conference in Macedonia. At that time we prepared a panel consisting of four brief presentations, based on short papers written in advance, and four dialogical spaces in which we reacted to each other in a circular choreography. All papers focused on our different experience with the complexities of collaborative inquiry. We wanted to demonstrate the fluidity and situatedness of knowledge production as well as multi-vocal character of dialogue and the dynamic tensions present in dialogical forms of knowledge production. The aim of panel choreography was to invite the unpredictable or the not-yet-known into the process.
As aforementioned, our group carried out a first round of a joint collaborative inquiry and attempted to create a possibility for others to look into it, too. Our preliminary discussions lead to a collaborative writing project based on the collective analysis of our experience. Four years later, we offer another round of dialogue, this time based on the reflection of a whole process of inquiring and writing together. Drawing on another group of scholars, we created a writing assemblage in which “...communications were sometimes voluptuous, sometimes antagonistic. In the delíre of unexpected moments, in the call and response to one another, as we cast out lines that made new thoughts and being possible, we spun off the rails in different directions, leaving ourselves perhaps where we were at the beginning but somehow with everything transformed.” (Wyatt et al. 2011, 16-17)
During our encounters we learned to enter the unpredictable field of a mutual not-yet-known in which she/he becomes different from her/himself. Such encounter represents for us an event of transgression. Through many moments during the whole process we had to enter such space of the not-yet-known in which our different expectations and ways of understanding ceased to makesense. We learnt to become different and move among different structures of understanding – or, in other words, to let the free indirect speech deterritorialize and take a line of flight to a different “assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987). We opened ourselves for questioning by an “outside” (Foucault, 1987) and let ourselves to be changed by this. In our workshop we will present a part of our dialogue reflecting a common experience. Also, we will offer space for general discussion on becoming in the context of knowledge production.