Experimenting with academic subjectivity: collective writing, peer production and collective intelligence

Sonja Arndt,Michael A. Peters,Tina Besley

doi:10.1080/23265507.2018.1557072

Sonja Arndt, Michael A. Peters

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2018.1557072

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Abstract

Following involvement in several academic collectively written articles, the authors question traditional notions of the ‘lone’ individualist author model as the expected standard in the humanities...

Highlights

As a practical experiment in collective writing we have all been involved in several collective writing articles
The experiment with academic subjectivity through collective writing, peer production and collective intelligence is under constant reinvention
With the recent work and experiments with collective writing and publishing as an attempt to reinvent the concepts of authorship, the author subject and author subjectivity, that were traditionally served and often perpetuated by the ‘lone’ individualist author model with all its accompanying ideals, this experimental work is itself continually contested

Summary

Introduction

As a practical experiment in collective writing we have all been involved in several collective writing articles. These studies ‘extend the existing empirical literature on public goods provision beyond its current focus on explaining individual contributions’ to gauge pro-sociality and the foundations of cooperation in public goods environments that speak to concepts of collective intelligence, involving changes in subjectivity in relation to authorship and scientific practice. Literary and legal literatures on the author, bring to bear more centrally notions of the collective author subject and forms of subjectivity that spring from creative appropriations of available networks in the peer production of symbolic public goods These new forms are new experiments in pedagogy, in learning exchanges, and in intersubjectivity – the self-conscious academic and creative writing, scientific or activist communities – with elements sometimes all happening together in, for example, existing environmental and ecology groups (Wals & Peters, 2017). It makes space in these confluences, for such knowledge valued in Western philosophical and academic constructs, and for wider thought, knowledge and affective sense, arising in diverse ways of being, for example in Eastern or indigenous philosophies

Conclusion

Findings

Notes on contributors