Potentials and Risks of Collaboration: Two Sides of the Same Coin or the Same Side of the Coin? A Response to Vassiliki Papatsiba

Abstract

In collaborative ventures in higher education are to be seen both potentials and risks. But how, then, is collaboration to be understood? Is it simply a matter of a point of view, with individuals focusing more on the potentials or more on the risks, depending on their dispositions? The risks and potentials of collaboration, it might be suggested, are just two sides of a coin, and either sighting is as valid as the other. Such a relativism, however, should be eschewed here. Žižek's metaphor of the Möbius strip is potent. The risks and potentials of collaboration run into each other and both are real. But perhaps the image of the Möbius strip is itself too limited. Collaboration in higher education is more like a curling strip, forming many tendrils extending into the distance. Possibilities unfold here, in which risks and potentials are held together, those possibilities formed largely by the imagination.