On Collaboration

Here, ART team member Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar reflects on the ethics of collaboration during the research process.

A photograph of an "obliterated space" in Colombia, the site of a mass grave where the author collected stories of lost ghosts.

Countering extractivism

One of the most pressing issues that has arisen in Colombia’s development-oriented research is the relevance and definition of collaboration. It has become an almost obligatory issue amongst development-oriented funding institutions to include some sort of ‘collaborative’ aspect in research proposals. A particular kind of ethics of collaboration is somehow promised, that is supposed to question the power structures and its inherent hierarchies on which much art-based and social science research is oriented: academics versus practitioners, theory versus data, the local versus the expert etc. I wrote about this ‘extractivist logic’ almost two decades ago when I wrote Unravelling Silence: Violence, Memory, and the Limits of Anthropology’s Craft. In this essay, I reflected on the idea of collaboration as a counterweight to the structures of ethnographic knowledge production about violence and political transitions, particularly in South Africa. All these years later, I realise how collaboration has become a vacuous term, a synonym of cooperation or participation that often, in the best of cases, is limited to only incorporating the point of view of the ‘beneficiaries’ of larger development agendas. This means it has lost its critical potential.

In Colombia and elsewhere I tend to distance myself from the euphemisms associated with the technical intervention applied in development projects, or even from the typical academic processes used in contexts such as working with ‘vulnerable people’ or victims of armed conflict: cooperation, help, assistance, transfer (of expert knowledge, technologies, or objects, for example), amongst other things. These euphemisms already have been incorporated by many grassroots organisations, whose work focuses on producing knowledge about trauma, development, transition, vulnerability.     

Narratives of the Future, part of Art Rights Truth and a much wider personal research project of mine, adheres to the obvious general ethical measures traditionally taken into consideration by ethics committees in the social sciences, such as informed consent, ensuring participant anonymity, where necessary, and having concrete psychological mechanisms in place in cases of crisis. In this regard, given the nature of the information that this research generates, there is a risk of harm to the specific people or communities involved, including collectives of artists working in conflict zones, individual artists, youth groups, or audiences. Colombia is, in any case, a country where many layers of violence still coexist, even after the work of the Truth Commission (2018-2022).

However, and precisely because it deals with violence, harm, and the everyday, Narratives of the Future is based on a narrative, sonic, and itinerant methodology I call ‘itineraries of the senses’, which proposes an ethical perspective that goes beyond these formal requirements. This is a process that considers ‘epistemic collaboration’ as central to its development, which places an emphasis, among other things, on a long-term engagement with communities of pain as well as, crucially, rethinking the various steps involved in social research. In other words, it is about working with others, not on others.

Ethics as Politics

In the social sciences, academic research not only requires that scholars follow the minimal ethical guidelines set at different levels, particularly by their local institutional ethics committees and professional organisations, but should consider ethics much more broadly. For me, working with victims of forced displacement in Colombia several years ago led me to thinking on the kinds of practices we call collaboration, in which the space of investigation is shaped by other peoples’ modes of asking broad questions regarding dwelling in an injured life-world. Of course, part of working with is to recognise that many encounters between ethnographers, therapists, humanitarian workers, or technical experts, amongst others, with these worlds is traversed by a complex set of power relations. A collaborative epistemology begins by deconstructing these relationships and assumes instead the bonds that exist between ethics and politics. Any methodological decision is itself a political one.

From my own perspective, a collective process of this kind creates an emotional and communal buffer which minimises the potentially damaging effects of the actual act of conducting research on the victims of violence and can help protect the security of the participants (in personal, physical, or psychological terms). As we know, a long-term process also strengthens a sense of trust in collectively managing the effects of research and facilitates access to the world of survivors in a more profound way. For me, the long-term situation is the most central issue.

In this process, there are stages that can be ‘co-produced’, in the most generous and broadest sense of the term: conceiving the problem at hand, problematising the practices around conducting ‘fieldwork’, imagining ways of ‘collecting’ testimonies and life stories, understanding that translating, transcribing, editing, and writing are political acts. For example, if we situate ourselves in the problem of writing and authorship (and its curatorial and narratorial power), it could be possible that the structure of a chapter or a book, or the ways in which ‘voices’ emerge in the academic text can be possibilities for joint work. A book could truly be polyphonic in the sense that its narrative thread is a fabric of testimonies, vignettes, and fragments defying the linearity of the academic text, creating a sense of multiple authorships, and diminishing the colonisation of the victim’s voice. The idea of collaboration may decentralise up to a point the authority of the researcher. In other words, in addition to the products usually expected in academic worlds, this project sees its own collaborative process as a central part of its results.

Conclusion

In sum, when thinking in these terms, it is necessary to explore the tensions between analytic rigour, politics, and ethics in order to devise other forms of listening to ourselves and others. Perhaps, the consequence is that, by doing this, one may step outside the boundaries set by disciplinary journals or schematic review boards. Collaboration, when it is possible, requires a deeper engagement with multiple knowledges (including ours as scholars) than simply a project-oriented exchange.