Competing Ideologies of Collaborative Research

Abstract

Collaboration advocacy is born both of perceived necessity and ideology. Necessity, since for in situ language research, community partnerships and interdisciplinary work have resolved problems of non-collaborative research (e.g. fraught communication, lack of access, limitations of data, theory, or methodology). But this advocacy also reflects ideologies of “empowering research” (Cameron et al. 1992). Strenuous objections to collaboration have been raised by a few within documentary linguistics and within the humanities in general. Some scholars are concerned that political correctness is overwhelming academic concerns (Malik 2000, Crippen and Robinson 2011). Some humanists view collaborative approaches entailing larger data sets as a covert rejection of contemporary literary analysis (Golumbia 2012). The pushback against collaborative approaches is ideological, rather than methodological or theoretical, and mirrors larger trends in the humanities. Do ideologies of collaboration create new obstacles to research? If so, what approaches could mitigate such effects? Identifying both methodological and ideological barriers enables better practice in linguistics, from research design through data analysis.