Resilience in Partnership Research—The Role of Digital Platforms in the Co-creation of Knowledge in Pandemic Times

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of this chapter is to narrate and conceptualise the changing processes that occurred when an interdisciplinary team transitioned from face-to-face workshops to a shared digital platform space in a historical time of crisis. The chapter describes how an interdisciplinary partnership project overcame obstacles, such as the respective institutions using different communication systems, to explore possibilities for partnership research through using a common digital platform as a tool for collective writing and for experimenting with writing genres. Inspired by cultural-historical theorisations of collective resilience, we describe how team members reinforced each other to strengthen risk situations, overcome them and use them as sources to support joint development of practices and co-research. We call this collective resilient digital agility. According to a cultural-historical perspective, resilience can be understood as a higher psychological function resulting from collaborative processes (Wertsch JV. Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv26071b0, 1988). The results show that the pandemic and the shift to using a new artefact, a digital platform, changed what it was possible to do, strengthening resilience and ways of working together and opening up a co-creative writing genre.