AO: These fictional case studies are based on experiences from studies of transnational medical research in Africa. They use this genre “in order to reach as wide of an audience as possible.”
AO: Analysts note continued reference to “overseas research” with rhetoric that continue to express hierarchical center-periphery geographies (implying secluded islands of civilization in the wilderness).
AO: The analysts note that discussion around bioethics in research has led to renewed emphasis on capacity building, and obliged Northern initiatives to invest further in involving African people in research, sometimes as a funding requirement. They note that at the end of colonialism such efforts were labelled ‘Africanization’. “The persistence of the term in discussions of research provides yet another point of continuity between the past, present, and suggested future of medical research in Africa.” (239)
AO: The analysts use post-structuralist work to aruge that the current imaginary of the “subject as informant” does not stand given the desire for the epistemic partner to perform an intellectual operation. The analysts argue that the renegotiation of the rules of engagement with the dialogic, epistemic subject opens the intellectual space for a rethinking of collaboration.
AO: The analysts are engaging with two senses of the term collaboration (which they argue they are not using). First are critiques of collaboration with the less powerful and formally silent subject in traditional ethnography. Second are the “collaboratory of the information age and the operating ethos of the organziations that define the processes that anthropologists study worldwide”; the blending into the ideological order (i.e. going along with the collaborative milieu but still functioning under the independent fieldworker conception of fieldwork (85).
AO: the analysts build on Marcus work on “complicity” in multi-sited work and Holmes’ work at the European parliament (88)
AO: The analysts note that the science of team science is currently in its nascent stage and that definitions are being debated. For example, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary are used interchangeably. They note the plurality of definitions and operationalization of the concepts and argue that greater clarity is needed.
AO: Analysts talk about a readiness framework that is nested and looks at the different levels.
QUOTE: “which types of readiness factors (e.g., psycho- logical, interpersonal, organizational, societal, techno- logic, scientific) exert the greatest influence on the effectiveness of team science projects and initiatives”
AO: The analysts believe that assessments of a network’s productivity are likely to be critical to understanding its value-added contributions (S246). Example being solving complex problems.
AO: The analysts look at earlier examples of large multi-partner collaborations which noted that conditions for improving collaborative action included the processes (goal setting, funding, management and monitoring), contexts (meta-governance, problem structure and socio-political contexts) and the actors (leadership and partners). They also note commonly experienced challenges, including those related to differing knowledge systems, time requirements, status and power asymmetries, unrealistic expectations, and bureaucratic barriers between institutions. (3)
AO: The analysts are also engaged in responding to the growing discourse of “openness” noting that “If “[s]cience’s peer review depends on openness [and] openness prevents science from becoming dogmatic, uncritical and biased” then community peer review extends this ethos to a broader form of openness.” (2)
AO: The analysts use the concepts of “consent” and “refusal” from feminist scholarship to ground the protocol.
AO: The analysts use the concepts of harm and benefit to describe why scientists should use this method: “the method of community peer review is designed to allow communities or researchers to work together to ensure a dissemination proposal that reduces harm and increases benefit for communities” (6).
The first person they explicitly cite in text (on page 9) is Gayatri Spivak (and doing “homework”.
AO: The analysts propose six theoretical perspectives to explain and examine collaborative behavior: resource dependence, corporate social performance/institutional economics, strategic management/social ecology, microeconomics, institutional/negotiated order, and political.
AO: Analysts argue that limitation of current theories of collaboration (in organizational theory are that most focus on the individual organization rather than interorganizational problem domain. They hold that focus needs to shift from org to domain level. (meso to macro?)
AO: The analysts use resource dependence theory to describe why interdependencies are created (because some orgs possess vital resources and are the source of environmental pressures for others). To reduce these pressures, orgs enter collaboration to gain control over crucial resource supplies. (156)
AO: Analysts leverage theories of collective action to ask: “what are the relationships between the self-interests of individual participants and the collective interests of the stakeholders of the problem domain?” (161). Analysts note that stakeholders’ self-interests and a problem domain’s collective interests are not as easy to separate as they first appear.
AO: The analysts are thinking over the valuing of volunteer labor within scholarly collaborative projects. How not to broad-brush categorize all scholarly work that doesn’t have a wage-relation as inherently exploitative and also not to make payment the sole criterion for valuing the kind of work that we do. They hold that key to an ethical engagement with volunteer colleagues is not separate from the ways we think about paid labor–and that “this means thinking about the specific conditions both of those undertaking the work as well as the nature of the work itself.”
AO: The analysts leverages scholarship critiqing the “lone (male) ethnographer” to highlight the inherently interactive process of knowledge production.
AO: The analysts cite similarities with feminist methodological work from the 1980s and 1990s where questions of “what counts” (what knowledge, what skills, what experience etc.) were key to debates about the status of women in the academy and in knowledge production (see e.g. [Harding 1987] [Hartsock 1998]).
AO: The analysts cite Willard McCarthy who suggest that “true collaboration within a group happens rarely” because it requires an “unboss”’, someone, according to McCarthy, who is “primus inter pares”, i.e. an actor able to make calls on what is valid and yet able to step back and allow others to lead and act as the work demands [McCarthy 2012, 2]. This is no easy task.” (12)
AO: Analysts cite new materialism turn in 1970s, Latour, Haraway, Barad (27)
AO: The authors are largely influenced by and citing 1970s and 80s feminist theory (they are also publishing in notable feminist journal, Signs). They are interested in “writing the body” by paying attention to ways they have embodied the collaboration.