Editors’ Introduction Hester Baer and Alexandra M. Hill It has long been a commonplace that humanities scholarship is the purview of the lone individual, a type of research, exemplified by the monograph it produces, that is best carried out in solitude, with ample time and space for contemplation and inspiration. Figured by the caricature of the genius in the ivory tower, this characterization offers, at best, an idealization of working conditions that rarely obtain for today’s scholars; more commonly, it operates as a foil, suggesting derision and even contempt for ostensibly outdated modalities of study falling outside the parameters of enterprise, innovation, and utility that define knowledge production in the twenty-first-century university. The persistent conception of humanities research as the purview of the individual scholar reflects, on the one hand, an erroneous impression of the state of the field, neglecting as it does not only the exciting collaborative work that is emerging— especially in burgeoning areas like digital humanities and energy humanities, as well as in the trend toward public-facing projects— but also the increasingly precarious material conditions under which many humanities researchers operate, a far cry indeed from the ivory tower ideal; on the other hand, and not least due to such challenging conditions, this ideal continues to serve as an aspirational paradigm for many scholars in the humanities, persisting, of course, within assessment schemes that insist on single-authored work as a requirement for hiring, promotion, and salary increases. Within this context, collaboration has emerged as a potential antidote to the so-called crisis of the humanities (and of higher education more broadly in the age of austerity). Hailed by some as a cure for the ostensible isolation, competitive individualism, disciplinary entrenchment, impracticality, and/or inefficiency of humanities research, collaboration is indicted by others as an imposition of the neoliberal university, one more [End Page ix] move in the dismantling of paradigms that once enabled the pursuit of critical thinking and non-utilitarian forms of knowledge. Of course, collaboration is nothing new for feminist scholars, who have long pursued the interdisciplinary, anti-hierarchical, and collective forms of academic endeavor that are enabled by working together. Indeed, there is a well-established tradition of collaborative feminist scholarship in the humanities, perhaps exemplified by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s groundbreaking coauthored work of feminist literary criticism The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). For pioneering feminist scholars combatting patriarchal structures and traditions in the 1970s— as for feminist scholars in the neoliberal academy today— collaboration has long offered a means of solidarity, empowerment, and intellectual synergy in the face of the often isolating, depleting, and oppressive forces of (academic) life. As Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose put it in their 1993 essay “Strange Bedfellows: Feminist Collaboration,” “We believe [ . . . ] that collaboration among academic feminists, conducted as it is against institutional odds, is exhilarating, consoling, and precious” (559). While harnessing this type of exhilaration in their own collaboratively written Awkward Politics, Carrie Smith and Maria Stehle also complicate earlier accounts of feminist collaboration by emphasizing not only its galvanizing potential but also its messy and fractious qualities. They write: “Recognized at times as subversive, at times as revolutionary, collaborating as a form of writing pushes back against paradigmatic notions of single-authorship and destabilizes the canon, whether intentionally or not, though it does not necessarily do so in a manner that connotes anti-power or anti-property” (19). For Smith and Stehle, the significance of collaboration inheres not so much in its efficacy for achieving certain feminist aims (whatever those might be) but in the process of working together as a form of politics in and of itself. Drawing explicitly on feminist care ethics, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in her book Generous Thinking, advocates for collaboration as a deliberate response to the dovetailing structures of privatization and competitive individualism that have enervated higher education in the twenty-first century. As Fitzpatrick argues, cultivating a spirit of generosity and cooperative engagement “requires not just new pedagogies, or new internal structures; it requires a new paradigm, even a new political unconscious: a turn from privatized, rationalist, competition-based models for knowledge production to ways of knowing, of learning, of being in...
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Jul 26, 2022
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