A Cappella and Diva: A Collaborative Process for Individual Academic Writing: Overture

Picture this: Five academic women are sitting at a round table in an elegant nineteenth century room located in a rural landscape in regional NSW. Sometimes with coffee, sometimes over lunch, the conversation ranges broadly across the spectrum of the personal, policy and university politics. Having traversed the terrain in which they work—workload, juggling the responsibilities that traditionally fall to women—the talk comes round to the business of the day: writing for publication. Here is how a typical meeting unfolds: they provide updates on their research successes, and then proceed to the discussion and critical response to a current piece of writing by one or two members of the group. While the rest of the group may not be familiar with the content or discipline area, they nevertheless are able to provide a meta-analysis of the structure and resultant clarity of the work using an agreed process. When the discussants—“the Divas”—talk about their posters or papers, “the a cappella group” analyses key structural features including the question posed, the main message to be conveyed, how the research was conducted and the scholarly contribution it makes to the field. Overture This “collaboration” theme prompted us to unpack and reflect on our mode of collaboration, something we had discussed informally but not written about in any structured way. We have a successful mode of collaboration that offers individual benefits as well as enhancing the research output of the university. In this paper we reflect on how our collaborative process benefits us individually and seek to make sense of our collaborative practice. Through this reflexive process we have identified six aspects of our interaction and collaboration (motivation to translate our research into publications; training in the template; multidisciplinary feminist consciousness; a negotiated process; commitment to practice on a regular basis; and trust and reciprocity) that have contributed to the success of our practice. Our roundtable discussions provide a space in which the distinct but complementary disciplinary a cappella voices come together. Each of us arrives with an individual piece of research (our solo performance) and then through a group process of questioning and reflection we rehearse and refine our arguments. As a result of this process, each returns to her individual research context better equipped to perform as a Diva. We have come to conceptualise this process as one in which a po