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Writing With:
Collaborative Writing as
Hope and Resistance
Marcelo Diversi1, Ken Gale2,
Claudio Moreira3, and Jonathan Wyatt4
Abstract
Collaboration in scholarship holds the peculiar position of being expected, encouraged, and,
in the process, somewhat taken- for- granted as monolithic academic practice. Collaboration
is important for the cultivation of a rich ecosystem of ideas, thoughts, methods, theories,
and experimentation. It seems safe to assume that most scholars would agree with the
need and the possibilities of collaboration. Yet, collaboration in scholarship is often under-
stood in reductionist and pragmatic ways: While ideas and thoughts flow in certain stages
of the collaboration, labor is often divided among collaborators, authorship is ranked and
quantified, and subjective lived experiences are most ignored or codified in rigid fashion. In
this article, we attempt to further explore how collaboration can also be an act of leaning
on each other in order to make sense of thinking and narrating hope and resistance in times
of neo- nationalism and authoritarianism. We each live in different parts of the planet, yet
we share a common hope. Here, we come together to think, feel, commune, and write
with each other in hope to find ways beyond individual positions and in search of collab-
orations that allow us to imagine possibilities of resistance and paths toward a kinder and
more just future.
Keywords
autoethnography, collaboration, writing with
1Human Development, Washington State University Vancouver, USA
2Centre for Creative- Relational Inquiry, University of Edinburgh, UK
3Communcation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
4Institute of Education in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Plymouth, UK
Corresponding Author:
Marcelo Diversi, Washington State University Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave, Vancouver, WA
98686, USA.
Email: diversi@ wsu. edu
Article
International Review of Qualitative
Research
00(0) 1–11
© 2020 International Institute for
Qualitative Inquiry
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub. com/ journals- permissions
DOI: 10. 1177/ 1940 8447 20978761
journals. sagepub. com/ home/ irq
International Review of Qualitative Research 00(0)
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In this article we write from despair and anger. We write too with desire, with hope, and
with each other. We write with. That is our small claim here: we have to write with.
Writing With: What Good Does It Do? (March–May 2018)
Ken
I am writing to you engaged in the vibrant activism of thinking as doing, as world
making.
In this, I sense I am writing with you.
As I do this, I am washed by tides and ows of feeling.
As I type these words, I sense you all out there, in virtuality becoming in actuality.
As I type these words, I see your faces, your beautiful smiles and so I sense you all
in here.
Out there, in here, in the always moving play of individuation, where the isolation
of human individualism has to give way to the constant individuating play of always
emergent, ontogenetic relationality.
I am warmed by the pressure of your passionate hugs and I am becoming in immer-
sion; in this space, we create through our friendship and our sharing.
We four have never written with before. I sense this writing with in terms of new
becomings. I love the potency of this beautiful not yet known. I know, that as I write,
something new is always emergent in this writing process that is generative of the
substance of me, you, us, we, them, they, those … I know that when I speak these
words, when we are together, “them, they, those” will also be becoming in the sharing
and the warmth of our embrace.
In the creation of this writing space, I am sensing my friendship with you all and
how this sensing works to give me condence to experiment, to try something new. In
this, in this tapping of keys and the fragile creation of words on this cold, showery
Spring day here in Cornwall where, from my window,
I can see birds collecting twigs and grass in the building of their new nests …
I can see shining leaves and fresh buds on the trees and sense new life emerging
from stark winter coldness and …
I can hear the sea; a near distant whooshing of waves crashing on the shore a short
distance from my home … there is always a calling in the vibrant energy of that sound …
Jonathan
No waves here today. No birds, no twigs, no grass, no nesting.
Here is only the relentless fall of damp snow on an early April late afternoon, on
and on. Winter is coming. It’s April and winter keeps on coming, rolling in from the
north and east, a continuing winter thrust here by changing patterns between the polar
vortex and the jet stream.
Diversi et al. 3
Sometimes you feel helpless amongst the global, planetary changes that happen.
What good does it do that I remembered to toss the empty plastic water bottle in the
recycling bin this morning?
What good can we do? What good can we ever do, as environmental, political,
social, global patterns change, way beyond our apparent power to inuence or resist
them?
What good does our work do?
These are well- worn questions, perhaps more present with some of us these days
than they might previously have been. Apart from the heaviness of the weather, I am
not sure why they’re here with me now, writing with you, but I’ll trust that they belong.
Claudio
Writing with…
I am writing to you engaged in the vibrant activism of thinking as doing, as world
making. Said Ken
And…
What good does our work do?
Asks Jonathan.
No waves here today either. It is morning after a winter storm. April 15th and ice
fell from the sky all night long…
I poke the inch- long ice in the ground…thinking about our writing and the pain that
will come to my back after cleaning the drive way…and I fell moving toward the dis-
placement, the (un) location of the work (world) of Trinh T. Minh- ha.
Writing with the three of you not afraid where this writing is going to take me…us.
From the displacement of ice surrounding my house to what it seems a long sheet, or I
may say shit, of ice along the Atlantic that get to my brothers across the pound. My own
inability or impossibility of ever felling at home. The disturbing sensation of not having a
home to come back…
At least for now, it is from this (un) location I am engaging in our endeavor. A displace-
ment that allows to recreate concepts, as Ken beautifully stated as a vibrant activism of
thinking as doing, as world making, and the, yes, I am too with you. We are in this writing
as we are in our personal and professional lives. We are making the world, as friends,
brothers, fathers, uncles, public intellectuals, scholars, and activist and writers.
Marcelo
I don’t know what our work can do, good, bad, in between, both, a bit of this and that…
But I can tell you, Claudio, Jonathan, Ken, and everyone here with us today, that our work
together, our writing with each other, does a whole lot of good to me! Alone, as a single
individual, I am just a speck of dust in the wind. But with you I feel larger, connected,
vibrant, more hopeful. I teach large classrooms every semester, I interact with strangers
and beloved people every day, so me feeling good because of our collaboration,
International Review of Qualitative Research 00(0)
4
friendship, and the collective hope you make me feel has a rippling eect. Your earnest
attempt at cultivating collaboration, connection, mindfulness keep me going during the
daily grind of committees, academic budget cuts, scholarship metrics, and bad cafeteria
coee.
Ken, since your rst invitation for us to write with each other, back in September of
2017, I have been feeling especially connected to you and Jonathan. I am always con-
nected to Claudio, of course. This connection has been particularly helpful this past year,
when our worlds are so polarized and angry and jaded and unsure, in a moment that seems
both globalized and retracted into nationalism, a globalized punctuation of Us versus
Them. Thinking of Ken, Jonathan, Claudio, our ICQI community, knowing that the four
of us would be here today, sharing this collaboration with you, has made me think of the
powerful and massive western swing back to politics of exclusion in less desperate ways.
Each of us is in a dierent latitude and longitude, yet we are together in the same project
of resistance against oppression and imaginations for more inclusive and fun- loving
futures. And I imagine the four of us presenting our “writingwith” to look something like
this at the congress (Figure 1).
Figure 1. (L to R) Claudio, Ken, Jonathan, and Marcelo at the international congress of
qualitative inquiry, May 2018.
Diversi et al. 5
Ken
Here live my research creations; here is the nascent energy of my becoming active with
you, right here, right now, in the visceral tentativeness of these words appearing on this
screen, before pressing “send” and feeling them go ying from me and miraculously
appearing there, with you.
This is where I begin with my animation of Spinoza’s claim that bodies, all bodies,
human bodies, nonhuman bodies, material bodies, discursively constructed bodies all
have the capacity to aect and be aected. This capacity comes to visible life in the releas-
ing of energy: these capacities are therefore to do with power. As I tap these keys and live
with the emergence of these words, I move toward you. I am full of power in bringing you
to life with me; you are full of power in taking these words and acting with them in rela-
tion to me, in moving toward me. These words are agentic, they are processually enactive;
we are alive in performing selves in and with one and other. This is world making.
So, in these writings we live in collective compositioning. In writing with, our activism
works in collaboratively relational ways to do things dierently, to create dierence in
new formings and emergences. This writing with demands of us a volatile presencing in
which our collective composition is always in- formation, never still, always moving
toward that always new not yet known; in this, I sense acts of activism whose nesting
materials, new life forms and crashing waves are always animate in bringing vibrant,
pulsing new life into play.
Jonathan
Writing with
This newness of writing together, we four, we fellow ICQI travelers over 14 years.
Over most of those 14 years, we have been writing in our pairs, writing “between our
twos”, betweeners all, writing and presenting alongside each other in various congu-
rations, perhaps passing by at rst then traveling with, dierently.
Here we are now, though, in our four- piece boy band on stage for the rst time, work-
ing at what it means to write with each other and all we each, and collectively, bring.
Writing with
We don’t have much time. Not in any sense.
Claudio
Writing with…
Instead of a much more common practice in academy of writing about…
Growing up as poor in a so- called third- world country, I’ve been written about!
Always written about. Like a decoration piece in somebody’s living room or more
often, as a piece of dirty (I am trying very hard not to use the word trash) in a street or
neighborhood somewhere, that needed cleaning…that needed to be sanitized, or sim-
ply educated! 14 years in our congress, and yet, once again, a friendly voice told me
after I nished my performance: “you’re so full of anger!”
International Review of Qualitative Research 00(0)
6
As Denzin said somewhere: “writing creates the worlds we inhabit.” Writing with
create dierent possibilities for entrance of bodies in the knowledge production, and
that brothers cannot be taken for granted. Dierent possibilities of yes, anger and
hope. Create possibilities for the four of us, from dierent lives, geographies and his-
tories, to write, to make worlds and words, our temporary nests, where we may rest a
bit, with care, love and respect. Reinventing our masculinities and whiteness to crate
possibilities for a more just world. Moving from Stuart Hall’s concepts of “the pessi-
mist of the intellectual” to “the optimism of the will.”
Writing with allows for the breaking and remaking of worlds, the kinesis concept
that Conquergood (1991) created for our performances. In the words of Trinh:
You who understand the dehumanization of forced removal- relocation- reeducation-
redenition, the humiliation of having to falsify your own reality, your voice—you know.
And often cannot say it. You try and keep on trying to unsay it, for if you don’t, they will
not fail to ll in the blanks on your behalf, and you will be said. (Minh- ha, 1989)
Writing with allows us here, with dierent persons, trying to unsay, unwrite, the
neoliberal system (the colonial forces), in the academia and elsewhere.
And yet, I agree with Jonathan, our four- piece boy band in our rst show, doesn’t
have much time…or does it?
Without being afraid of where our writing is taking us, and being walking around
Jonathan’s question, I passed it along:
What good does our work do?
Marcelo
It has been quite overwhelming for me to think about Brexit, Trump, the return of
angry sentiments toward immigrants, refugees, the Other, alone, by myself in my
oce, at home, walking the streets where I live and labor, reading the news, talking to
my mom about the state of our world. My mom, she is 77 years old. She asked me the
other day, why do you think we are back in a political place where another world war
could happen? I didn’t have an answer, of course. But I have been wondering about
that every day since Brexit and Trump happened. Uncertainty. Anxiety. Where are we
headed? [my head down, a moment of silence].
From your words, it sounds like each of you is in the middle of some version of this
existential moment. I imagine many of us here in this room today are experiencing
some version of this. Who amongst us could have imagined that a USA president
would be bragging about having a bigger nuclear button than a dictator from the other
side of the planet?
I feel good writing with you. I felt a lovely warmth when I read Ken’s initial email
inviting us for a foursome. I don’t have much hope for humanity on my own. But I nd
hope, energy, courage, and beauty in being part of a collective. Today, and for the past
several months, I have found hope and strength in your friendship and words. Ken,
Diversi et al. 7
Claudio, Jonathan, you make hope for a kinder future possible. I don’t nd that any-
where else. I hope we keep nding ways to stay close.
What Was Going on Behind Each of Our
Backs (August 2018)
Ken
Ken, writing in the days and months since those earlier lines were rst penned, found
himself writing in the other of another person. There, in the writing, with the memory
of his friends, lovers, and co- conspirators ooding the now- ness of his memory, creat-
ing a not- yet- ness in the writing that he was making up on the page in the presence of
sense. He sensed smells, sweat, smiles, hugs: the viscera of one- ness in the spatio-
temporal dispersal of bodies that touched in actuality and that stretched the bands,
bounds, and bonds of virtuality through the creative doing of new written words, com-
ing to life on the page.
And he remembered Jonathan’s email to Anne on 10 July, thanking her for sending
the various pictures of Marcelo, Claudio, Jonathan, and Ken performing their aair,
bringing to life their boy band on stage, during the Autoethnography Special Interest
Group event at ICQI in May. In response to receiving the pictures, Jonathan said:
Thank you, Anne! So lovely to have these. We get to see what was going on behind each
of our backs. :-)
Jonathan x
And he wondered what was, what is, what will be, happening behind our back?
Happening behind our back? Such a strange anthropocentric inection, premised upon
the rationalist notion that backs can’t see, that somehow in the depths of what Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) referred to as the black hole of subjectivity there is something
going on that we are not party to. If we take up the Deleuzian challenge of “faciality”
then we don’t simply need eyes to see; “seeing” is bodily, it is about sensation, it is
about the here and now of now you see me now you don’t, about the ooding, owing
tides of becoming other in the company of four (or more). He thought again about the
experience of presenting, the animate and active bringing to life, and the beautiful
emergent politics of touch that was (is) the presencing of those bodies. More and more
he realized that he was not thinking of them simply as individual bodies, encased
within a politics of identity, wrapped up in cozy comfortable blankets of skin; no, he
was thinking of them as becoming over and above, within and out of containment,
always more than one (Manning, 2013), both oozing out and soaking up in porosity,
leaking all over the stage, coming together and moving apart in the sensual dance of
the here and now, the rhythm of the one and the other, becoming the other and the one
in the agencement of bodies always doing in the constant processual ow of individu-
ation. He thought to himself in the consideration of these/those beautiful loving acts of
International Review of Qualitative Research 00(0)
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activism (Madison, 2010) how “seeing” was being done, being done beyond and
above, within and around, in front of and behind, those sweetly perspiring, tensing and
exing, always moving backs.
So, as he began to pen some kind of rhizomatic bouncing o that shared collective
“performance” and of those earlier writings that prompted the movements in its few
gleeful moments, he read Jonathan’s brief email again and, contained within it, the
expression of the minor gesture of (getting) “to see what was going on behind each of
our backs” (Baldwin, 1979). His thoughts took him to that spacetime and to the know-
ing that what was “behind” those backs was, in the actuality of those brief, intense
dancing moments, deeply imbricated in the presencing, the coming to life of the not-
yet- ness and the always more than one of those deeply aective selves always in the
making.
He wondered how those others felt, what were their sensings? How were they com-
ing to life in the madness of the beautiful moments? His movements gave him life: he
continued to live in the bliss of a life of wonder.
Jonathan
It is a moment of coming to life, a moment of coming to life anew. I read Ken’s won-
derings and I am back (forward, now) there in that moment of stand, move, read on
that morning in May.
We were each and all always moving. As we read our breath and voices moved,
even as we stood still. We read our few lines and when done we gave way to another,
who read then gave way, and so on. Each time, we nished our moment of reading, we
moved—to the side, around, back, joining the others as another one of us stepped for-
ward to stand, move, read. Finish, move, fold into one another; another stands, moves,
reads.
The photographic image does not convey this dynamic, this owing between and
around, this front- to- back- to- side- to- back- to- front- to- side constant shifting that car-
ried the words we were oering. It seems from here, now, that in the presencing Ken
speaks of, the “coming to life of not- yetness,” this movement was also the hope we
were claiming in our writing. It was being found in a sense of the other; how we were,
are, “given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (Butler,
2004, p. 28).
Marcelo
I agree with Jonathan. The picture of us in the moment of our presentation, in a partic-
ular moment of our presentation, does not capture the dancing and friendship and
improvisation and movement of our presentation, of the strong sensorial memory of
our presentation. Yet it, the picture, gives me a perspective I did not have during the
presentation, that of my mates’ facial and bodily expressions, forming a wall of warmth
behind my back. I knew they were there while I was reading my piece. I knew they had
Diversi et al. 9
my back. But I didn’t know they had been standing so close together. We normally
don’t stand so close to each other in academic conferences. I often think of the ease
with which we did that, without planning or rehearsing. In a time of deep political
divisions in our dierent homelands, the United Kingdom and Brazil, and in the land
of the conference, the USA, our joy in writing, thinking, and presenting with each
other seems at the same time deant and soft. Seeing my mates’ entanglement with
each other, their standing with, as we were each reading about the power of writing
with, gives me another jolt of hope for the journey ahead, a journey of resistance and
endurance against a renewed politics of exclusion and dehumanization, a journey that,
I think, requires stubborn eorts in keeping inclusionary imaginations alive, possible,
alive even.
I have been working harder than usual to keep the faith in inclusion and social
kindness, to honor the eorts of those who came before and on whose broad shoulders
we stand as we try to nd/make/imagine the proverbial arc bending toward justice.
Douglass (1845/2003) wrote about having a sense of hope for liberation even in the
darkest hours of his life as an American slave, imagining hope as “ministering angels”
cheering him through the gloom (p. 39). Freire (1995/2004) wrote that hopelessness is
but hope that has lost its bearings. I am inspired and comforted by Douglas’ and
Freire’s ability to keep hope alive in the darkest hours. Yet, I often don’t know how to
do it when I am by myself, alone in thought and thinking and feeling and writing.
Often I can’t will hope to stay alive on my own. But I have found that writing with
others brings my hope back to its bearings, even if for brief and eeting moments.
Writing with Ken, Claudio, and Jonathan, with our autoethnography community, has
cheered me through the gloom. May we continue to write with and through these divi-
sive times.
Claudio
Conquergood (1991, p. 180) taught us that “performance… is an intensely sensuous
way of knowing.” Performance, for me, is the for of us nding and losing ourselves in
being, doing, seeing, and experiencing our four- piece boy band on stage for the rst
time. It is our writing and memory, our touches and images, out theories and lives.
Again, I found and lost myself in my everyday performances…
Just last week, I was driving to Francisco’s school to pay the annual fee for his high
school bus. A fee of 150 dollars…Ironic, right? I stayed inside my car in the school
parking lot for more than 5 min. Tears refusing to stop falling from my eyes! Relief
and shame! I don’t live in Yemen! My children don’t live there. Suering and despair.
I am really tired of our justications…and yet, after few minutes, I went to the school
building, smiled at the secretary, paid my bill, and was back home to teach my online
class…after all the yellow bus will come, won’t it?
Marcelo said it better. I cannot be alone. And I have to ght to remember that I
believe in education…in our work. That I don’t want to hold guns and be a part of such
violence, knowing perfectly well, that I am.
International Review of Qualitative Research 00(0)
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My children are not being separated from me and Dani…
Without you, without this work, without love, I lose my bearings.
With all the limitations and impossibilities of our bodies, writings, images, perfor-
mances and scholarship, this, what we do together, gives me a sense of being…a
resolve somehow.
In temporally closing, I would a return to an early moment of re- interpreting time.
Where we are found and lost, in presence and memory, in touches and images, in his-
tory and geographies, and in performance, to arrive in a living writing, which also may
be lost and found by us and others, at least for now. Bringing Jonathan’s question yet
again:
“What good does our work do?”
James Baldwin (1979, p. 3) comes to our stage:
You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t,
but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes ac-
cording to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people
look at reality, then you can change it.
And so, we write and perform
We learn and teach
We hope because we are humans!
We resist because we must! (Figure 1)
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no nancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
References
Baldwin, J. (1979). Interview by Mel Atkins. New York Times Book Review, September 23, 3.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Conquergood, D. (1991). Rethinking ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics.
Communication Monographs, 58(2), 179–194. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 03637759109376222
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia a
translated by. Brian Massumi.
Douglass, F. (1845/2003). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: An American slave.
Barnes & Noble’s Classics.
Freire, P. (1995/2004). Pedagogy of hope: Reliving pedagogy of the oppressed (R. R. Barr,
Trans.). Continuum.
Diversi et al. 11
Madison, S. (2010). Acts of activism: Human rights as radical performance. Cambridge
University Press.
Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Duke University Press.
Minh- ha, T. T. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Indiana
University Press.
Author Biographies
Marcelo Diversi is Professor of Human Development, Washington State University
Vancouver. He is the co- author of two award- winning books on autoethnography, doz-
ens of articles in leading qualitative inquiry journals, and the recipient of several
teaching awards along his career.
Ken Gale works in the Institute of Education in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at
the University of Plymouth in the UK and has published widely and presented at a
number of international conferences on the philosophy of education, research method-
ologies and collaborative approaches to education practices. His most recent book,
Madness as Methodology: Bringing Concepts to Life in Contemporary Theorising and
Inquiry was published by Routledge in 2018.
Claudio Moreira is Professor of Performance Studies, Department of Communications,
University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the co- author of two award- winning
books on autoethnography and dozens of articles in leading qualitative inquiry jour-
nals. In 2016, he won the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of
Massachusetts.
Jonathan Wyatt is Professor of qualitative inquiry and director of the Centre for
Creative- Relational Inquiry at The University of Edinburgh. His book, Therapy,
Stand- up, and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative- Relational Inquiry, published
by Routledge in 2019, won the 2020 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry
book award.
