September 29, 2025

Co-authorship as an (Unfinished) Project

Key Points

Co-authorship is conceptualized as a negotiation and intellectual exchange, enhancing collaborative efforts.
The authors suggest that responsibility is vital in understanding and developing collaborative authorship.
This project utilizes counterfactual transcription to engage critically with the past and explores alternative writing methods.
The approach is informed by 'low theory,' providing a unique lens on traditional academic knowledge production.

Abstract

The article offers a refl ection on co-authorship as a humanistic practice with critical potential.It takes as its starting point an artistic research experiment centered around the collectivereworking of an academic panel transcript. The authors conceptualize co-authorship throughthe lens of negotiation and intellectual exchange while emphasizing the importance of responsibilityas a key category in understanding collaborative authorship. Drawing on the notion of a „low--stakes game” and informed by Jack Halberstam’s concept of „low theory”, the project unfoldsas a speculative intervention into entrenched models of academic knowledge production. Counterfactualtranscription emerges here as both a tool for critical engagement with the past and a site forexperimenting with alternative forms of collective thinking and writing.

Mark Helpful

Bookmark

Relay