AO: Authors argue for working the metaphoric image of the “double bind” which project situations of disjuncture and unresolvable contradictions.
AO: The analysts note the way marginality creates its own margins leading to a persistent mismatch between explanations and everyday life (152).
AO: The analysts note that the way we talk about theory and practice obscures the fact that there are dramatic material effects based on the ways that we conceptualize and talk about the world. This is a very important point for my project!! (154).
AO: Strategically engaging the “double binds” within which we operate. The analysts note that “double bind situations create a persistent mismatch between explanation and everyday life, throwing the ethical agent into modes of subjectivity marked by sensibilities of constraint rather than freedom. Constraint can be engaged strategically, working within, rather than in denial of contradictions.” (151)
AO: The analysts argue that understanding how double-binds emerge, frustrate and at times dramatically transform relationships can move our understanding and communication to new levels. (152) These can lead to a desire for explanation and solution and avoid grand theorization.
AO: Analysts argue that “formation of new social alliances, often across divides that once seemed rigid, is as important, and tricky, as formation of new modes of representation” (156).
AO: The analysts highlight that the strategic use turning the diversity of epistemic cultures into a resource marks the politics of collaboration. It is a bit difficult to nail exactly which “stage” of the research process they are thinking about but it seems like it is especially during the fieldwork and political engagement / practice aspects when the intellectual is working alongside the organizations.
AO: These analysts are most interested in how collaboration shifts over time and note that organizations reposition themselves in response to new cultural forces and political-economic contexts.
AO: According to these analysts, the politics of collaboration requires critically engaging new associations between people, linking micro and macro processes to turn pluralism into a strategic resource. They find collectivity can not only be difficult to produce but also can be marginzalizing and alienating. (146)
AO: They note that challenges described are not a failed attempts at solidarity or neutrality and their goal is not to stand apart or within but “alongside,” “aligning themselves in ways that respect different positions, different kinds of expertise and new ways of assuming political responsibility.” (148)
AO: The analysts describing being “at risk” (which is not the same thing as identifying with the subjects of study), rather, they argue an ethnographic attitude is a mode of practical and theoretical attention, a way of remaining mindful and accountable. It is about risks, purposes and hopes embedded in knowledge projects. (160).
AO: Fortun and Cherkasky note that collaboration “draws people with different interests, perspectives and skills into synchronized effort to accomplish something that could not be accomplished individually. To work, collaboration must turn diversity into a resource. A politics of collaboration is a politics of difference.” (146)
AO: The analysts argue that double binds are created and sustained by work within organizations. They define “organization” both as a social body in which intersubjective exchange is materialized and often routinized but other “organizations” can be broad discourses like feminism that constrain and oblige from afar. Such organizational affiliation produces multiple connections and demands.
AO: Analysts argue that socializing and writing in different forms can become a way of both recognizing and reconfiguring how power operates.
AO: The analysts draw their conceptual framework around Bateson’s notion of the “double bind”. They ask multiple sets of questions includeing:
construction of social roles for individuals in organizations (what motivates individuals to affiliate with an organization in pursuit of political ends?)
how political organizaitons generate new theories, methods and rehtorics responsive to particular demands of the projects with which they are invovled (154)
how do individuals in organizations locate responsibilities and rewards they incur in their interminably doubly bound positions? (how were conceptions of responsibility articulated?)
AO: The analysts talk about a need to pursue linkages between macro and micro perspectives citing Marcus and Fischer and organizational theorists (“new institutionalists”).
AO: The analysts are thinking about collaboration as a politics of difference and the labour that is required to work across such different to turn diversity into a resource. They note that collaboration can be nefarious and that collaboration marks difference rather than sameness.
AO: Contrary to much of the development literature I have been reading which emphasizes the normative value of collaboration as empowering and benefiting, this piece highlights difference and potential for marginalization even within the project of “collaboration.” The analysts focus heavily on the meta and meso levels of analysis (asking questions largely at the level of the “organization although they define organization not just in the narrow sense of the word but also as broader discourse like feminism). They also conduct analysis at the level of edxo, working out the expertise and “counter-expertise” relied upon in different collaborative formations.