Collaboration-led Research

Abstract

The figure of the research student squirreled away in the university library or dorm room, isolated and alone, writing their single-authored theses and dissertations has always stood in stark contrast to the intensely social nature of academic life, either among faculty or in a teaching and mentorship setting. Yet, such individual work is always judged on its originality, its contribution to existing knowledge. Such a process continues to serve academia well, as it reminds us that even such individual form of research assumes an implicit form of collaboration - it recognizes the contributions of others, and seeks to build upon them. The distinctiveness of university research, of academic work, however, can unfortunately no longer take for granted the value of this scholarly form of collaboration, this exchange of ideas encoded into canons, and across, within, and among disciplines. Rather, the value of such collaborative knowledge (shall we call it the arts, humanities, ethics, aesthetics?), seemingly no longer stands on its own merits. Instead the value of university-based research is increasingly being asked to follow - or otherwise facilitate - narrower short-term economic or commercial imperatives. In such an environment, however, university researchers should not shy away from collaborative forms of research; but instead the university - its leaders, faculty, staff and student- should use such opportunities to demonstrate the distinctiveness of the post-secondary education sector, a space that neither exclusively leads nor foDows, but works as a distinct partner in the search for solutions and insights on the range of social, political, cultural, and economic problems that our society faces. Rejecting mandates to follow the needs of any one sector of society would reinvigorate a collaborative research agenda, and would demonstrate to government, business, parents, and students the uniqueness of the university sector - a sector in dire need of support across society. As partners in research, such a form of collaboration would move beyond the rhetoric of innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity to enable participation from newly committed researchers, both individuals and teams of researchers, that are duly recognized and integrated into research collaborations before, during, and after the project A collaboration-led research culture would consequently emphasize the need to both identify distinct skill sets and knowledge in an experimental process; in short, one that would, like SSHRCs research-creation program, encourage the coupling of, and the interplay between, research and development. The project team initially consisted of Ken Werbin (then a post-dodoral sdiolar), Steven James May (research/produdion assistant and PhD candidate), Andy Opel (the aforementioned documentary film professor), and Brett Gaylor (then a not-for-profit Montreal-based filmmaker and web-video platform developer). As with most teambased projects, much of the first year consisted of reminding or asking each other what we had in fad proposed, and again how we were going to undertake the research and productioa The proposal was a particularly tight document, a roadmap for developing techniques for soliciting video clips, remixes, and other media objects to contribute to a broader - initially - web-based documentary video that sought to further themes developed in Andy and my (2008) co-authored book, Preempting Dissent. Gaylor, director of the well-received open source documentary RIPf: A Remix Manifesto (2008) offered the open source cinema web-based remix platform for our project