Collaborative Writing as a Process of Inquiry within Knowledge Ecologies

On Being Called to Gather

At the time of this writing we are just over two years into some form of our research assemblage. It is quite difficult to locate a specific originary moment, and as you will read, we each have our own trajectories into the project. One tentacular starting place might be when the research formalized in the summer/fall of 2023 when Mairi, Bart, and shortly after Kathryn decided to apply for a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) grant at our university. The broad emphasis of our Expanding Knowledge Landscapes project, as articulated in the grant application, is to find ways to fully support the integration of values and ways of knowing that might not seamlessly fit into the conventionally recognized product-oriented and rigidly bounded scholarship.² We want our research to seed and nurture a knowledge ecosystem that emphasizes what Fung calls strengths-based scholarship, or scholarship that is interested in ideas that matter to the scholar and the community they are working within; able to lean on the authenticity of the scholars’ ways of knowing the world; and rife with humility to internally expand how we come to know the world in dialogue with others, including through the gifts of knowledge, shared in products such as theses, journal articles, and books.³ As a research assemblage, our specific avenue of inquiry into those broad considerations is to engage with graduate students and supervisors at our institution to ask about their experiences creating a “non-traditional” thesis in their field of study through surveys and focus groups.⁴ In emphasizing our collaborative writing as a process of inquiry, inspired by Laurel Richardson’s work, we animate our lived sense within our assemblage that “[t]hinking-with makes the work of thought stronger, it supports its singularity and contagious potential. Writing-with is a practical technology that reveals itself as both descriptive (it inscribes) and speculative (it connects).”⁵ We can say, returning to this introduction during our revisions, that our process of co-writing indeed helped us describe and speculate, or reveal connections not already present in the experience and commitment to expanding knowledge landscapes.

Mapping the Broader Terrain of the Research and Our Assemblage

Academic settings do not really value eclectic writing-with, especially when it explodes the category of disciplined “peers.”⁶

Someone recalls—What bothered me when I came to anthropology was that so many people said, “You’ll have to leave the poetry behind now.” There was a sense that social science required a distance from direct testimony or direct engagement in people’s lives, in order to have some kind of authority. I detested the whole idea of this authority—it seemed to me that a text didn’t have authority, it had authenticity.⁷

In a world surging with pain, violence, suffering, uncertainty, and oppression, we have sensed a shift in the interests in and reasons for pursuing higher education among students at our institution. There is increased concern with investing time, money, and energy in knowledge production that more directly reaches the communities for whom and with whom they are hoping to engender material change, which is linked with institutional commitments to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).⁸ Simultaneously, though, through the marketization, conservativism, and neoliberalization of post-secondary education, we have witnessed an ever narrowing of the “acceptable” and “recognizable” forms of scholarship.⁹ Limiting what knowledge is produced and how the knowledge is (re)presented by way of form and genre inhibits the democratization of education. In different ways, these noticings resounded in each of our bodies calling us to ask these questions: What knowledge is of most worth? And Who decides? Little did we know, at the outset, how entrenched the forces limiting what comes to constitute scholarly communication really are. We are in a time when more folks from diverse backgrounds, lived experiences, interests, and politics are pursuing post-secondary education. Simultaneously, electronic publishing possibilities are purportedly no longer limited by the material costs of printing longer pieces or how ideas-words can show up on a screen. Yet our work remains wedded to print-based models for publishing scholarly communications, and (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the neoliberalization of post-secondary education) the publication form and style decisions are made through business models of the scholarly journal publishers with little to no direct theoretical or practical experience in creating scholarship.¹⁰

Have you ever wanted to include something beyond text in your writing, even in electronic publishing, only to be told the journal platform, or other preservation space, could not support it? Maybe you never considered or asked, instead keeping yourself and your articulation well within the parameters expressed by the author guidelines on many journal submission sites. Perhaps you have taken the stance that you will wait to express yourself more fully until after: after you are more firmly situated in the academy, after you graduate, after that manuscript is finally published in a top-tier journal, after you get a tenure-track job, after the successful grant application, after tenure and promotion, so you must remain legible to the supervisory committee, hiring committee, funding agency, your peers, and on and on it goes. Given how vast and entangled these narrowing forces are, we set our intention to focus on graduate level theses both because of the interests expressed by graduate students we named earlier in this section, as well as with the hope that we can seed change towards more expansive and ecologically diverse knowledge landscapes as graduate students breathe new life into what is possible in their/our fields and beyond before habits become entrenched.

Our collaborative inquiry, the full title being Expanding knowledge landscapes by generating supports to enhance graduate student experience and mentorship in preparing theses, then, delves into fundamental questions circulating in the broader atmospherics of scholarly communications, including the following: What is scholarship? What happens when ways of knowing and being are muted and discounted within the classificatory regime determining and valuing knowledge? What is higher education for, or what is the role of higher education in the world? These questions move us to explore the realms of ecologies of knowledge production, mobilization, and dissemination, storage, and searchability that have potential to transform and expand conceptualizations of scholarship at the early stages of a formal scholarly pursuit through a particular focus on thesis creation in graduate education from the perspectives of students and thesis supervisors. In other words, through our concern with expanding knowledge landscapes, we want to consider the full ecosystem of knowledge production from inception through to sustainable and ethical storage and searchability.

Part I: Multiple Pathways into Gathering to (Re)Introduce? the Research and Our Processes of Co-writing

In many ways, as noted above, throughout the life cycle of our work, in and as an assemblage, we have been co-writing the research, while a more literal process of collaborative writing materializes in the creation of this article. What we mean by this will become textured/textualized in and through your experience reading the article, as much as we will try to share signposts to help you navigate the affective terrain of the collaborative scholarly communication we are mapping in our writing.

Now we find ourselves with the challenge of finding a way to share with others how our collaborative writing/creating within the ecology of our emergent research assemblage has been taking shape. Doing so, we continue to express the tensions of being pulled into conventional writing, which we believe dishonors the core of our research, while also being unsure how to expand our scholarly communication in the act of writing together with variant interests and investments in the research. Before we continue, we would like to introduce you to the research assemblage, the “we” of this collaborative writing.

Opening A(nother) Pathway into Ecologies of Knowledge Production through Gathering Our Voices

As we worked through the preparation for the proposal, we found ourselves collectively desiring to honor the overall focus of our research—expanding form and genre possibilities of scholarly communication, as discussed above. Even as we take up the first-person plural pen, the “we,” we also sought to honor the different “I”s that form the assemblage. Each of us who has been involved in the research assemblage brings our own interests and desires to the work which offer particular contours to how it is being articulated, as addressed in the previous section. Reflecting on this, three members of the assemblage (Mairi, Bart, and Sefat) decided to pose a series of questions for everyone to respond to (see Appendix A).¹¹ Some of the responses directly show up in this piece of writing, while others were held and carried through in different ways in the process of collaborative writing. As you read, know that a core principle of the way we work is grounded in a more holistic approach to how research comes into being. Rather than emphasizing “getting things done,” setting rigid timelines, and demanding that each of our contributions be “equally” measured (as if they are measurable) and accounted for, the invitation was offered with the caveat that if this is not where your mind-heart-body-spirit is at this moment, there are other ways in which our voices may be presenced and preserved in the writing. You will notice in Appendix B, for example, that not every voice is present in the responses, and yet each member of the assemblage at some point shared their thoughts and reflections on the questions posed (in hallway conversations, email exchanges, edits to this article, or comments during meetings). Indeed, none of the writing would have taken shape the way it has without the various contributions from each member of the shifting assemblage that were not always directly related to the writing of this article.

Of the questions we hope will further illustrate our layering of voices as an enactment of ecologies of knowledge production were What brought you here to this project? What desires/interests/investments/expectations do you bring with you to the possibilities of/for the research? To which we garnered the following responses:

	Christie Hurrell: All graduate students at the University of Calgary deposit their thesis into our institutional repository at the time they complete their degree. The primary goal motivating me in this work is to make our repository a more welcoming home/resting place for “non-traditional theses”—this encompasses everything from the deposit process for students to discovery and long-term preservation.
	Abigail Williams: … I’m reconnected to the meeting we had in the library about what it really means for students to be able to be themselves through their work and how we are, in our own way, defending that… . So, in this sort of advocacy, I find an excitement, this new excitement I see going forward. I am also thrilled by a space for academic work to be thought through differently, an accepted way that considers an-other way of doing and knowing … that can enable diverse students and their ideas equitably, and can permit a space for the inclusion of distinct voices… . I recognize an authenticity that can be accessed through bridled creativity, and it opens up the possibility for me to consider doing the same.
	Sefat Jeshin Rimpu: My journey of non-traditional thesis started when I was doing my thesis in my first master’s program. As a secondary school teacher, I wanted to push the boundaries of conventional language teaching in my classroom and wanted to explore the spaces to address those complexities in my thesis, venturing beyond the traditional boundaries of scholarship and checkboxes. In my journey with the process of non-traditional thesis, I find the freedom of curiosity, vulnerabilities, and adaptability in the form of alternative spaces of scholarship that address the diversity of perspectives and allow the tensions in the process of intellectually adventurous journey surging in a pluralistic world of epistemic diversity.
	Laura Reid: My interest in this project is two-fold. One, my academic and professional experience as a musician/creative artist has presented many instances of either conforming to external expectations to justify work or make work tangible, and this often feels like having to change the shape of what you are actually doing, resulting in a compromise in expression, process, and / or result. There has been an influence from these external expectations of “valid” forms becoming integrated into practice, but there still remains a discomfort or awkwardness in how these expressions relate to the nature of artistic disciplines beyond the gates of academic work or grant writing. This experience of navigating misfits/misalignments and what is often lost (honesty of expression) and what is gained (professional opportunities) is a perspective that I think applies beyond arts work and fits within the research question of defining knowledge and defining rigour and validity in process and production in academia. The second impulse stems more from my support role and perspective as a librarian, my experiences with considering Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge practices (working with Maskwacis College, current work with COPPUL’s [Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries] Indigenous Historical Publications group) and the local context of University of Calgary Indigenous Strategy ii’taa’poh’to’p.12 I think this research project allows for a practical lens into the experience of Indigenous scholars and how culturally relevant processes and formats have been received. This information can provide grounded insight into where we are in our parallel pathway journey beyond high level language and policy and into meaningful experience of students and scholars.
	Mairi McDermott: I have shared this story before, and so it might be in one of the meeting recordings. What really prompted me to initiate this project was from personal experience. I encouraged students to think-write beyond the rigid and narrow parameters of what counts as scholarly writing in my teaching and supervision. I noticed great energy and epistemological playfulness through creative assessments in courses at the same time as I noticed students struggling to contort themselves into the recognizable and acceptable articulations when reading thesis proposals and final theses (see McDermott 2023, 2024 where I discuss this more thoroughly). When speaking to grad students their ideas would flow, conversationally and pedagogically, and then when they had to write them down, so much seemed to come undone. Finally, in co-writing a piece with a couple of graduate students and an undergraduate student, I had to witness the deflation from the peer-review comments when time and again we/they were told that the ideas were great; however, they needed to be formatted differently, they needed to come into line with the conventional section headings. Realizing that I did not have the resources to find journals that would be amenable to playing with form and genre, I felt like I was letting the students and the writing down. (Good news, we did find a journal that published the piece; see Tyler et al. 2022!) Ultimately, I wanted to be able to have more resources to support students in their creative, playful, expansive writing as they come into their pens (their writing voices). If we continue to limit ourselves to ever-narrowing forms and genres of knowledge creation, then we are going to lose so much fertile ground. We need the diversity of entities (ideas, genres, forms, people) to ensure that we are able to attend to the complex and ongoing oppressions, violences, climate catastrophes in our world.
	Kathryn Ruddock: We have supported some archiving and disseminating non-traditional theses through our repository, the Vault, yet there is still a lot of room for improvement. Students come to us when they are ready to archive, and we’ve had to be creative in creating a submission and preservation strategy that will fit into our current infrastructure. A deeper understanding of the thesis creation process from both faculty and student perspectives is crucial. This will enable us to build systems and processes that work for emerging needs, rather than try and fit unique forms into a box. I’m particularly interested in the intake, description, submission, digital preservation, and discovery of non-traditional work. The Vault not only preserves the history of our students’ thesis work but also allows us to track the evolution of thesis formats at the University of Calgary over time. By analyzing this history, we can develop tags that enhance the discoverability of various forms and methods and adapt our processes to accommodate emerging thesis formats. The challenge lies in updating controlled vocabularies at a pace that matches the rapid evolution of academic terminology, ensuring that new forms are integrated rather than marginalized.
	Bartlomiej Lenart: Mairi’s experience was the causal reason why I’m part of this assemblage [as we were initially in conversation around publishing unconventional work in quite conventionally minded journals—our larger project and this article are examples of how this conversation never really ceased and how it continues to evolve], but my broad interest in recognizing our biases and situatedness with regard to what knowledge is being produced and where it is being discovered resonates with the spirit of the project.

A Few Notes on Ecosystems of Knowledge as Theoretical and Conceptual Terrain

As a research assemblage consisting of members with various histories, desires, and lived experiences, we each believe different, alternative, creative, or non-normative forms of scholarship contain the promises of epistemic diversity and testimonial justice.¹³ Through our process of collaborative writing, we came to recognize a broader conceptual container, what we refer to as ecosystems of knowledge production, that more radically (as in getting at the roots of our assemblage) holds our diverse interests, desires, and imaginations. The notion of ecosystems of knowledge production, while introduced to us early on in the research, took on enhanced resonance within the context of the “On Gathering” call for papers and like a theoretical framework helps to hold it together and give it shape. In other words, working through common commitments to epistemic diversity and testimonial justice brought us towards ecosystems of knowledge production. This orientation to ecosystems of knowledge production, then, iteratively shapes both the Expanding Knowledge Landscapes research as well as our methods of gathering and collaborative writing.

Let us describe this in another way. Ecosystems of knowledge production contour two aspects of our work: (1) methodologically how we approach our research, orienting us outwards to the ways we interact with participants and how we pose questions, and (2) relationally how we work together as an assemblage, turning inwardly to our interactions with one another. What we noticed in this collaborative writing was how when we gather, whether in meetings or through various acts of co-writing, we layer our voices and experiences to create an entangled web of possibilities that carries this research and nurtures epistemic diversity (you’re invited to witness one illustration of this in Appendix B).

One of the initial goals we had for this article was to include video recording snapshots of our meetings to invite you, the reader, to witness how we layer our voices in the act of creating material outputs, such as the survey, for our research. Since that proved to be unavailable, for a variety of reasons, we invite you to imagine the unfolding of a meeting with us. First, picture what your research team meetings are usually like. How do you feel? What is the overall atmosphere, sense, or affect in the space, be it virtual, in person, or dual modality? Who is present with you? Whose voices and perspectives are prominent? During our first formal meeting once the grant was awarded (May 16, 2023), after a land acknowledgment, we opened by responding to these prompts: What brings you to this work? What’s a word/phrase that comes to mind when you think about this work? What’s one desire you have for the project?

Figure 1. Expanding Knowledge Landscapes sample agenda

1. The Vault is the thesis repository space at the University of Calgary.

2. IRISS (Institutional Research Information Services Solution) is the online system that is used at the University of Calgary to go through institutional ethics review.

Before further describing the meeting, we would like to share a bit more of the history of the research taking shape, another pathway towards the work and how we relate with one another in collaboration. In preparing the SoTL grant proposal, we indicated that no graduate assistant researchers were involved in writing the grant due to our ethical commitment to refuse the institutional undertow of extracting free labor from already under-compensated graduate students. So, this meeting in May was the first time we were gathering as a whole team, with the recently hired graduate assistant researchers, Abi and Sefat. This is vital to know because we have stated and tried to enact a less hierarchical positioning of members of the assemblage. While Abi and Sefat were not involved in the broad conceptualizing of the research as articulated in the grant application, their voices, questions, perspectives, and contributions have and continue to significantly shape the contours of the research. Since that first meeting, we have instituted different practices to encourage all voices to have a space to be heard within the team, and while we are not naïve to imagine we can reach singular consensus, by talking through the different possibilities together, we work to ensure everyone feels okay with the decisions being made and direction of the work. This process can feel slow and tedious; however, we believe, after co-creating a survey from the ground up, that the care and attention we afford one another is infused into the instrument itself. Unsolicited commentary shared with some of us indicate that several survey respondents felt it was a particularly humanizing survey, one in which their perspective was genuinely invited and held with care. One core practice that we instituted as we worked through the bumpy, and at times frustrating, process of co-creating the survey was purposeful carving out of time at the beginning and close of every meeting for folks to share what had come up for them between meetings (at the beginning of the meeting) and what they were thinking-with and holding on to from the conversations during the meeting (which occurred at the end). These sentiments allowed us to air our affects, struggles, and “aha”s, cultivating fertile ground for the research and our own growth as individuals and as an assemblage.¹⁴ We certainly do not wish to suggest that because we instituted these relational practices there were no tensions—there were. However, we continued to work towards establishing a caring space rife with dignity (not competition and supremacy) where we encouraged and held the complex sentiments and lived realities shaping our lives and our ability to be present or contribute at different times throughout the research.

Both the emphasis in our Expanding Knowledge Landscapes research as well as how we gather as an assemblage are thus punctuated by epistemic diversity (variously called bibliodiversity and epistemic justice), which necessarily includes who is present and what parts of ourselves we welcome into and embrace within the space.¹⁵ Epistemology—ways of knowing—resides in more than just the brain; it is embodied and situated within our lives beyond the walls of academe. As we hope you are getting a sense of, epistemic diversity theoretically holds us and guides us towards fertile and vital ecologies of knowledge production. Embracing lessons from the natural world, we know deep in our bones that monocultures focused on profit (in the world of academia, by way of quantitatively counting and valuing publications that have become more rigidly confined, as we addressed earlier) are at greater risk of dis-ease and that ecologically diverse landscapes have the best chance at flourishing.¹⁶ In Appendix B, we share our rough responses to some of the questions posed to the research assemblage (see Appendix A) as a part of our process of co-writing. This will give you a raw sense of the layering of voices, ideas, and different orientations, the diversity within the ecology of our research assemblage that might yet allow it to flourish while being held together with a broad commitment to epistemic diversity and ecologies of knowledge. For now, we wind down this section with a re-emphasis that ecologies of knowledge production hold all aspects of the Expanding Knowledge Landscapes work as a theoretical vessel. In other words, while we appreciate the importance of describing theory in a stand-alone section of an article, we hope that you will sense how it is lived throughout our work—in particular, throughout our collaborative writing before, after, and throughout this section.

Part 2: Metaphor-Work: Going Beneath the Surface to Unearth Diverse Ways to Think-Live-Move with the Research

As indicated earlier, we were particularly drawn to the ecological metaphors in the “On Gathering” call for papers, specifically the ideas of ecologies of knowledge production and knowledge production life cycles. This language resonated deeply with the roots of the research, which was already playing, unintentionally, in ecological terrain, with the name Expanding Knowledge Landscapes. It was as though ecological metaphors were seeded early on, and at different times, those seeds have been nurtured, allowing them to grow, including through collaboratively writing into the container in the “On Gathering” call for proposals. In this section, then, we lean into some other metaphors that have helped shape the way we are gathering in and around this research, metaphor-work that affords expanding knowledge landscapes through ecologies of stories. When we are thinking-with metaphors, we find Chessa Adsit-Morris’s weaving of Donna Haraway and Chet Bowers particularly resonant. As she writes:

We have, as Haraway (2008b) describes, “metaphor-work” to do. Yet these metaphors (or figurations) “are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another”; such metaphors (and figurations) are where the “biological and the literary or artistic come together with all of the force of lived reality” (ibid., 4). This type of metaphor-work requires a biosemiotics—or eco-semiotics as Chet Bowers (2015) prefers—understanding of our relations or intra-actions because “reality is more complex than any [single] account that can be given of it” (Reid 1981, 182; as cited in Gough 1998). Thus, we need to create ecologies of stories—or ecotones—in which emergent new species and worlds appear.¹⁷

In Expanding Knowledge Landscapes, and our focus on graduate theses, we are cultivating the conditions to “create ecologies of stories” that may yet bring forth worlds beyond harm, competition, extraction, and individualism.¹⁸ The metaphor of ecologies of knowledge also resonates with the organic ecology of our research assembling, which, in turn, dovetails surprisingly accurately with theoretical (philosophical) musings on the expanded nature of cognition as not only situated in the head.¹⁹ Interestingly, Suzanne Simard, a professor of forestry, has recently made ecological connections to how our brain works in her discussion of mycorrhizal (fungal) networks functioning in forest ecosystems. Similar to neural networks, mycorrhizal networks use the same amino acids—glycinate and glutamine—to pass on information, or to communicate.²⁰ Furthermore, challenging the previously held beliefs that trees in forests are in competition for scarce resources, such as sun for photosynthesis and nutrients in the soil, Simard’s research demonstrated that trees share resources, moving nutrients and communicating warnings with one another so that no single tree is fully responsible for holding all the information required for life and flourishing.²¹ We sense connections with this to the philosophical considerations of interconnectedness between tools and embodied cognition allowing for offloading in cognitive processes in humans.

Philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers propose that cognition occurs beyond the bounds of the brain; they argue that the introduction of tools and technologies has allowed for the offloading of cognitive tasks.²² For example, using pencil and paper to perform long division allows a mathematician to only partially calculate internally while offloading some of the processes involved in the calculation onto the paper. Similarly, they propose relying on a calculator to multiply numbers while solving a larger problem literally extends the cognitive process to encompass the neural activity involved in the problem-solving as well as the electronic system encased in the calculator. Clark and Chalmers argue that we offload memory tasks by writing things down, utilizing digital planners, or saving phone numbers in mobile phones. Environments themselves can function as systems for cognitive offloading. When navigating a trail, for example, hikers need not rely on internal memory and processes to map the environment, as such mapping can be offloaded onto environmental markers and landmarks (the building of cairns as signposts is an example of how communal such offloading can be). This inspires our intention to create similar markers in the metaphorical thesis environment to create signed pathways that graduate students, and their supervisors, can navigate.

In “Making Things to Think With,” Daniel Dennett offers another example of such cognitive offloading.²³ Dennett goes so far as to argue that intelligence itself is dependent on our intrinsic habit of offloading cognitive tasks into our environments. Dennett offers the example of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, which in part results in the deterioration of memory. While people have difficulty following daily routines in assisted living facilities, when returned to their own homes with the benefit of years of sensing their bodies in a particular space and offloading their routines into a familiar environment, the symptoms of dementia become much less pronounced. What follows is an attempt to glimpse into the mechanics of what has been a very organic and thus sometimes messy process of knowledge generation within our research assemblage. We employ the analytic language of philosophical contemplations, which while metaphorical in nature, benefit from the kind of logical coherence philosophical musings tend to pursue to unearth some of the underlying and mostly invisible mechanisms (much like the mycorrhizal networks underground) that contribute to the organic nature of our process.²⁴

John Sutton argues that “[t]he human mind is ‘leaky’ both because it thus extends beyond the skin to co-opt external devices, technologies, and other people, and because our plastic brains naturally soak up labels, inner objects, and representational schemes, internalizing and incorporating such resources and often redeploying them in novel ways.”²⁵ The idea is that, functionally speaking, we are able to utilize exograms, which are external symbols, as well as engrams, which are the brain’s neural memory traces. Since exograms last longer and are easier to transmit, retrieve, and manipulate, they are ubiquitously utilized by embodied cognitive systems. It can be further argued that “since exograms can be manipulated by more than one mind (since they are publicly available), cognitive processes that involve exograms can in certain contexts be instances of multiple minds sharing external cognitive resources or even processes to perform individualized as well as synchronized computations.”²⁶ While the above conversation leans heavily on the cognitive realm, we re-imagine cognition as “brain-only,” expanding it to relational, affective, and embodied processes that contribute to sense-making in our lives.²⁷ Thinking-with Haraway, María Puig de la Bellacasa similarly animates and calls on us to remember that knowledge is not and cannot be individually owned, that it is always co-produced, thus requiring an ethics of care.²⁸ This idea that multiple individuals can be collaborators in a unified cognitive process lends support to Robert Wilson’s social manifestation thesis, which “is the idea that individuals engage in some forms of cognition only insofar as they constitute part of a social group.”²⁹

These groups can vary in size and constitution. On the large scale, culture, for example, shapes how we think about ourselves and the world around us and how we express our thoughts and other mental states, including how we express as well as how we experience and feel our emotions.³⁰ On a smaller scale, the specific constitution of a research assemblage, much like our own, will shape the process and direction of research, as well as what questions are pursued and how they are framed. The external influences, however, do not stop with the researchers themselves, but include modes of communication and tool use as well. Having worked remotely and meeting via Microsoft Teams and occasionally Zoom, and choosing to utilize organizational tools in Microsoft Teams, has also shaped the dynamics of our team in ways that, in turn, have influenced the process underlying the research project. One of our team members described how the use of particular tools has shaped their engagement with the research in the following way:

One of the contributions in that piece (Adema 2018) demonstrates how the move to electronic publishing has ultimately done very little in expanding forms/genres/representation. Instead, that electronic space takes the book or print article as the form and places it into an electronic format! Something else that occurred to me after a conversation with Bart and Sefat is around the different tools that we are taking up within this research. I consider this another language technology. Specifically, the use of Teams, which Kathryn proposed to get (and keep) us organized right away. There was, and continues to be, a steep learning curve; however, I am so grateful for this container as it proves to be a fertile archive of our gathering. Indeed, in getting into the writing for JEP, I returned to some of our posts and was able to situate the time and return to the feelings of intrigue when Christie shared the call for papers. Another technology and language I had to learn, and was grateful for the generous and patient teachers in this process, was that of Qualtrics and the survey. While I am learning these technologies, and they are crucial to the particular inflections and articulations within this research, I also know that I can lean on team members who are more familiar with the grammars and horizons of these tools.³¹

While some of the philosophical musings on cognition and the embodied mind’s connection to its environment are themselves metaphorical in nature, they are useful metaphors that aid in the unraveling of the many moving parts that constitute the ecology of our assembly. The “leakiness” of the human mind, the sharing of exograms, the conversion of external inputs into engrams, the reactive and collaborative nature of groups, the utilization and integration of environmental resources, and the difficulty of individuating parts from wholes and both wholes and parts from processes resonate both with the organic nature of collaboration and the ecological metaphors we have been utilizing to examine our process.

Returning to Thesis Life Cycles

We believe that we are at a crucial moment within our institution to establish better resources that allow for offloading so that creativity and diversity become the directions where energy is exerted throughout the thesis life cycle and, in doing so, can offer more complex, nuanced, and practical knowledge that is better able to attend to the issues facing society. As Jeff Frank suggests, “We cannot get an accurate picture of our world if we cannot hear the arguments of individuals who argue differently than we do, or who emphasize different aspects of the world as salient, or who question whether the authority we have established for ourselves is due to unearned privilege or to the truthfulness of our arguments.”³²

Where we are now as a research assemblage co-writing through questions of gathering is with a further commitment to defamiliarize the normative assumptions underpinning scholarly communications. If we continue to narrow the horizon of possibilities for what counts as knowledge, if we refuse to take a critical look at our own habituated practices within the institution, then we are participating in and complicitous with the ongoing harms and violences ravaging the world. Another way to phrase this is through Rosalind Gill’s queries: “What would it mean to turn our lens upon our [scholars’] own labour processes, organizational governance and conditions of production? What would we find if, instead of studying others, we focused our gaze upon our own community, and took as our data not the polished publication or the beautifully crafted talk, but the unending flow of communications and practices in which we are all embedded and enmeshed?”³³

When Gill prompts us to dwell in the “unending flow of communications and practices” or the ephemeral aspects of knowledge production that can go unnoticed with a product-oriented emphasis, we sense further generative possibilities of the ecological (and now cognitive) metaphors we have been thinking-with throughout our research process and co-writing.³⁴ In particular, as discussed earlier, ecologies of knowledge production, as a conceptual container, have invited us to think differently and attune to the messy, incomplete, multi-vocality inflected with multi-desirous aspects of our processes gathering and working together—our flows of communication. Gathering in the ways we have, honoring each of our desires, has similarly allowed us to both lean into the strengths we each bring to the research and offload particular tasks on one another and with the tools we have been working with and, we might suggest, which have been working on us—but that’s another article!

Part 3: Reflecting on What We Have Learned through Co-writing as a Method of Inquiry Entangled in Expanding Knowledge Ecologies: Towards the Vitality and Flourishing of Processual/Procedural Knowledge

[I]f research hasn’t changed you as a person, then you haven’t done it right.

—Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony³⁵

Through this process, we have been reminded that writing is a central, yet often undertheorized, aspect of knowledge production.³⁶ In particular, with regard to co-writing, we admit that we placed high expectations on what we could do, given the diversity of our assemblage and the different skills, knowledges, and tools we each have to offer. We have come to realize that so many of the great ideas and possibilities put on the table for us to disrupt scholarly communication conventions remain under the surface of what we have here on the screen-page, yet they still offer nurturance to our overall commitment to cultivating expansive knowledge ecologies. We have surrendered to what we were able to create through our co-writing, rather than bemoaning what we weren’t able to do. This seems particularly vital in our potential empathy with graduate students who may set out to create non-normative theses only to feel pulled back into line. While the pulling can happen through many means, not all are nefarious, as some of us may have initially assumed—the institution is full of gatekeeping and hierarchy, but that is not all that shapes our research and scholarly communication. Plainly, we have been changed through the course of this collaborative writing, as a part of research. We have lived, in our own ways and as an assemblage, a nested life cycle embedded within our broader research terrain in the process of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. These reflections and learnings are already showing up and shaping our engagement with the responses to the survey that we are beginning to sit with as we prepare our focus group protocols for the next stage of the research. With everything that we have been able to articulate, we begin to close the circle through a final discussion on life cycles and processual/procedural knowledge as vital to research-knowledge ecosystem flourishing.

Knowledge Ecologies in the Life Cycle of Co-writing as Gathering

So, we frame our fragmented story/ies as a process of the life cycle and ecosystem that addresses our knowledge and vulnerabilities in a gathering. We signify our assemblage by being able to access knowledge across our life cycle as a human and scholar, in ways that are appropriate and meaningful to us and pieces that extend and deepen the ecological and cognitive metaphors, in relation to scholarly communication and/or digital publishing collaboration. According to neo-evolutionary economists, such as Metcalfe and Ramlogan, knowledge or innovation ecology refers to “the set of individuals, usually working within organizations, who are repositories and generators of existing new knowledge.”³⁷ Returning to Simard who illustrates the limited reading of Darwin’s evolutionary theory that dominates the field of forestry through stories of competition and individualism as driving forces of/for “survival of the fittest,” we are committed to the collaborative and interdependent (she uses the term “obligatory” to describe relations that resonates with Puig de la Bellacasa’s conversation on thinking-with care) ways in which we ensure more flourishing within knowledge ecologies.³⁸

The concepts of ecology and ecosystems offer valuable insights into innovation through highlighting the intricate web of interdependencies within and between innovative organizations. Additionally, these frameworks provide a clear structure for analyzing specific patterns of technological advancement.

The navigation of the concept of ecology and ecosystem lies in the recognition of a complex interdependent relationship among individuals within and across innovative organizations as well as environment since an ecosystem implies that “everything is connected to everything; everything feeds back through the ecosystem on itself. The interconnectedness preserves the overall system.”³⁹ As Mairi shared her experiences in the assemblage: “I agree, I feel that the group’s commitment to gathering resources and articulating pathways into and through the thesis journey holds us together. Because we each have subtly nuanced foci, I am hopeful that we will be able to create a robust and inviting and supportive environment for students and supervisors throughout the entire knowledge ecology.”

It ought to be noted that ecology and ecosystem draw a fine line of difference by their focus on “interactions between living organisms and their environment” and “systemic interconnections generated through the interactions.”⁴⁰ So, ecology and ecosystem are not separated but interconnected by the interrelations of adjustment and readjustment to a dynamic environment to cultivate and reward innovations. Our gathering for Expanding Knowledge Landscapes encourages us to observe and experience how innovation resembles the living organism growing in a changing, historically contingent environment; branching out from and connected and nurtured by the mother tree metaphorically leads to a theory of innovative ecosystems of knowledge production.⁴¹ We metaphor our work as experiential and accumulative when we dwell in the uncertainty and unfinishedness of the polyvocality and polylocality of perspectives. The adoption of the ecological metaphor in our assemblage of innovation in scholarship leads us to question: What needs to be composted? What can we work with and what do we need to release in our process of conjuring or manifesting spaces of hope, expansion, and potentiality in/as scholarship?

As we echo with our ecology of knowledge production, a pluralistic approach is not enough to address epistemic differences as situated within power relations but also connecting academic work with larger social context and asking for more flexible, integrated conceptions of scholarly work/capacious views of thesis research that embrace situated and critical pluralism in epistemology and not relativism in epistemology.⁴² If the perspectives of those positioned without power in our social world go unheard, then our collective epistemic resources are less robust than they otherwise would be. Thomas Wartenberg’s point illustrates the role of social actors and their actions in shaping power dynamics.⁴³ While the general idea is that power is influenced by the overall social context, Wartenberg’s specific contribution is to emphasize the direct and significant dependence of power relationships on the actions and coordination with particular individuals or groups within that social context. Wartenberg states, “we must move away from ‘individualistic and agent-centered analyses’ to an interactive and relational view that judges individuals, acts, and the social conditions within which they occur.”⁴⁴

We situate knowledge production life cycles as potentially nested in broader ecologies of justice—be they epistemic, representational, material, or spiritual. While in dominant articulations, cycles are often simplified as linear and staged, moving from one discrete moment to the next; much happens in between the seemingly neat movement through cycles and in our contribution. We hope you allowed yourself to dwell in our “unending flow of communications and practices” within our research ecologies that are inclusive of publication and research-based knowledge creation cycles, as well as the variously positioned and interested members of our research assemblage.⁴⁵ In your dwelling, the entangled, contradictory, multi-voiced processes that often get left to the side—as excess—within the overdetermined focus on final products that are knowledge outputs can be considered and amplified. In other words, we hope you get a sense of our desire to further dwell in and expand on, as well as share with others, how the various voices and entangled entities of our assemblage have come together into an emergent project through our gathering.

The Possibility of Processual/Procedural Knowledge in Knowledge Ecologies

Finally, our focus on process has also unearthed an epistemic layer, which tracks an insightful distinction made by Gilbert Ryle in the 1949 book titled The Concept of Mind. Ryle proposed that there are two very distinct kinds of knowledge: propositional and procedural.⁴⁶ Propositional knowledge is sometimes referred to as knowing-that and points to knowledge we acquire when we learn things like what is the constitution of Jupiter’s atmosphere or that Calgary is a city in Alberta. Procedural knowledge, however, is contested to be of a different nature and is sometimes referred to as knowing-how because it denotes the kind of knowledge that cannot be acquired by just learning facts or steps to how to perform an activity, but rather must be learned by doing, by living in the process (which is why we link processual and procedural). Some examples of procedural knowledge include knowing how to play the piano, to ride a bike, to box, to paint, or to co-write as a method of inquiry!

While there is active philosophical debate regarding whether knowledge-how can be reduced to knowledge-that, Ryle advocated for the position that knowing-how is a completely separate type of knowledge, which cannot be reduced to knowing-that and thus cannot be transmitted in any other way but by taking part in the activity one is learning. By consciously reflecting on our process, we realized that in addition to producing research outputs that clearly fall into the category of propositional knowledge (as is exemplified by this very article), we were also acquiring deep layers of procedural knowledge, which, in turn, has had a great impact on our propositional outputs. You might think metaphorically again with the mycorrhizal networks as the unseen, underground, processual/procedural entanglements that nurture the work and the fruiting mushrooms as the propositional outputs, that which we can see, touch, feel, smell, taste above ground. This metaphor aptly captures how much goes on underground as the mushrooms only burst through the earth sporadically, representing so much more that goes on in their making.⁴⁷

Moreover, the very constitution of our team, the individuals who make it up, has played an integral role in how this processual/procedural knowledge has been acquired by the members of our assemblage. Our collective, relational, and embodied cognitive activities have given rise to an emergent process through which we have grown as researchers by, among other things, becoming more reflective about language. This has included being conscious of the ways language use can move us in directions we do not desire, such as the marginalizing propensities in the language of the “non-traditional” thesis that continues to trouble us;⁴⁸ more sensitive to distinct as well as communal voices; more perceptive with regard to varying and sometimes hidden layers within the data we have collected; and more aware of our own influences as researchers.

Additionally, the conscious reflection on process has shaped a tacit understanding of research in a very pronounced processual/procedural way, as we each have started to approach and conduct research in a more self-reflective manner. These are the kinds of research outputs that are not usually shared in more traditional settings, such as conference presentations that emphasize data analysis or paper publications. Nevertheless, these more internalized ways of generating knowledge are just as tangible and efficacious as more traditional outputs. Unfortunately, we can point to their existence, but we cannot easily share this type of knowledge in an article, which involves the transmission of knowing-that, since the know-how we as team members have acquired is processual/procedural and inseparably linked to the process. What we can do, however, is emphasize that a focus on process generates valuable knowledge outcomes. We hope that sharing our reflections on our own process will inspire other research teams to be self-reflective in this manner and to place more emphasis on the value of such procedural outcomes, since, in our collective opinion, these have been profound in our individual experiences and have resulted in the shaping of standpoints and the relationship between us, the researchers, and our research as process.