Transformative research collaboration as third space and creative understanding: learnings from higher education research and doctoral supervision

Abstract

ABSTRACT Any research collaboration can potentially transform the participants’ understandings and enhance their professional relationships with one another and with significant others. If this transformation is to eventuate, research collaborators need to exhibit mindfulness with regard to their multiple relationships, as well as to the intentions and effects of their collaborations.These requirements of transformative research collaborations align with, and build on, Macfarlane’s (2017a) influential, six-element representation of research collaboration as a moral continuum, through the authors’ rationale for adding a seventh element to this representation, centred on the ethically informed fusion of third space (Bhabha, 1994) and creative understanding (Bakhtin, 1986). The authors argue that this fusion enables researchers to move beyond the self-regarding and other-regarding binary underpinning Macfarlane’s representation, and also to progress to a new collaboration dimension that is fundamentally democratic in character as well as creative and productive in its effects.The evidence for this argument derives from the first-named author’s Doctor of Philosophy thesis (Veles, 2020), which investigated the cross-boundary third space collaboration of university actors, and for which the second-named author was a supervisor/adviser. The authors posit this particular research collaboration as transformative through its creative fusion of third space and creative understanding.