Results by title

30 books match the query 'Collaboration'

cover of Acknowledging Writing Partners

Acknowledging Writing Partners

Laura Micciche

University Press of Colorado, 2017

Acknowledging Writing Partners treats the genre of written acknowledgements as a lens for viewing writing as a practice of indebted partnerships. Like new media scholars who have argued that studying ubiquitous technologies such as the pencil reveals the mundane and profound ways in which writing is always mediated by tools, Laura R. Micciche argues that writing activities are frequently mediated by human and non-human others, advancing a view of composing that accounts for partners who emerge in acknowledgements: feelings, animals, and random material phenomena. Acknowledgements are micro economies of debt and praise; they reveal writing's connectedness, often repressed by the argument or set of propositions that follow. Micciche suggests new methods for studying and theorizing writing that take into account the whole surround of writing. In doing so, Micciche asks what difference this economy makes to dominant conceptions of writers and writing as well as to pedagogical principles that inform writing instruction—and what difference it make to writers.
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cover of Across Property Lines: Textual Ownership in Writing Groups

Across Property Lines

Textual Ownership in Writing Groups

Candace Spigelman

Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Candace Spigelman investigates the dynamics of ownership in small group writing workshops, basing her findings on case studies involving two groups: a five-member creative writing group meeting monthly at a local Philadelphia coffee bar and a four-member college-level writing group meeting in their composition classroom. She explores the relationship between particular notions of intellectual property within each group as well as the effectiveness of writing groups that embrace these notions. Addressing the negotiations between the public and private domains of writing within these groups, she discovers that for both the committed writers and the novices, “values associated with textual ownership play a crucial role in writing group performance.”

           

Spigelman discusses textual ownership, intellectual property, and writing group processes and then reviews theories relating to authorship and knowledge making. After introducing the participants in each group, discussing their texts, and describing their workshop sessions, she examines the writers’ avowed and implied beliefs about exchanging ideas and protecting individual property rights.

           

Spigelman stresses the necessary tension between individual and social aspects of writing practices: She argues for the need to foster more collaborative activity among student writers by replicating the processes of writers working in nonacademic settings but also contends that all writers must be allowed to imagine their individual agency and authority as they compose. 

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cover of Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation

Analogical Thinking

Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation

Ronald Schleifer

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Analogical Thinking argues that sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, a new mode of comprehension arose, supplementing received Enlightenment ideas concerning the nature of understanding and explanation. Focusing on the innovations of structural linguistics and its poststructural legacy, the individualism of Enlightenment knowledge and the collaborations of post-Enlightenment information, and practices of reading and interpretation across the arts and sciences, Analogical Thinking examines the ways in which analogical presentations of similarities respond to the experiences of twentieth-century culture.
The book traces this mode of thinking in linguistics, collaborative intellectual work in the arts and sciences, and interpretations of literary and sacred texts, concluding with a reading of the concept of Enlightenment in a comparison of Descartes and Foucault. The book examines the poststructuralism of Derrida; the collaborations of information theory and modern science as opposed to the individualism of Adam Smith and others, and analogical interpretations of Yeats, Dinesen, the Bible, Dreiser, and Mailer. Its overall aim is to present an interdisciplinary examination of a particular kind of understanding that responds to the experiences of our time.
Ronald Schleifer is Professor of English, University of Oklahoma. His books include Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory, Criticism and Culture; and Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry.
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cover of Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music

Band People

Life and Work in Popular Music

Franz Nicolay

University of Texas Press, 2024

A close look at the lives of working musicians who aren’t the center of their stage.

Secret (and not-so-secret) weapons, side-of-the-stagers, rhythm and horn sections, backup singers, accompanists—these and other “band people” are the anonymous but irreplaceable character actors of popular music. Through interviews and incisive cultural critique, writer and musician Franz Nicolay provides a portrait of the musical middle class. Artists talk frankly about their careers and attitudes toward their craft, work environment, and group dynamics, and shed light on how support musicians make sense of the weird combination of friend group, gang, small business consortium, long-term creative collaboration, and chosen family that constitutes a band. Is it more important to be a good hang or a virtuoso player? Do bands work best as democracies or autocracies? How do musicians with children balance their personal and professional lives? How much money is too little? And how does it feel to play on hundreds of records, with none released under your name? In exploring these and other questions, Band People gives voice to those who collaborate to create and dissects what it means to be a laborer in the culture industry.

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cover of Beyond Conversation: Collaboration and the Production of Writing

Beyond Conversation

Collaboration and the Production of Writing

William Duffy

Utah State University Press, 2020

Collaboration was an important area of study in writing for many years, but interest faded as scholars began to assume that those working within writing studies already “got it.” In Beyond Conversation, William Duffy revives the topic and connects it to the growing interest in collaboration within digital and materialist rhetoric to demonstrate that not only do the theory, pedagogy, and practice of collaboration need more study but there is also much to be learned from the doing of collaboration.
 
While interrogating the institutional politics that circulate around debates about collaboration, this book offers a concise history of collaborative writing theory while proposing a new set of commonplaces for understanding the labor of coauthorship. Specifically, Beyond Conversation outlines an interactionist theory that explains collaboration as the rhetorical capacity that manifests in the discursive engagements coauthors enter into with the objects of their writing.
Drawing on new materialist philosophies, post-qualitative inquiry, and interactionist rhetorical theory, Beyond Conversation challenges writing and literacy educators to recognize the pedagogical benefits of collaborative writing in the work they do both as writers and as teachers of writing. The book will reinvigorate how teachers, scholars, and administrators advocate for the importance of collaborative writing in their work.
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cover of Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, And

Career Moves

Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, And

Libbie Rifkin

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

How much did "making it new" have to do with "making it"? For the four "outsider poets" considered in this book—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan—the connection was everything. At once a social history of literary ambition in America in the fifties and sixties and a uniquely collective form of literary biography, Career Moves offers an intimate account of the postwar poetry underground.
Making the controversial claim that anti-Establishment poets were at least as "careerist" as their mainstream peers, Libbie Rifkin shows how the nature of these poets’ ambition actually defined postwar avant-garde identity. In doing so, she clarifies the complicated link between the crafting of a literary career and the defining of a literary canon.

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cover of Centers for Learning: Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration

Centers for Learning

Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration

James K. Elmborg

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2011

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cover of Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies: Revising Identities and Institutions

Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies

Revising Identities and Institutions

Laurie Grobman

Utah State University Press, 2025

Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies focuses on the largely unnoticed and unexplored tradition of faculty/undergraduate publication in writing studies. Coauthoring makes new authorial identities and relationships available to both faculty and students and demonstrates promise as a way to increase access to meaningful research experiences for undergraduates from communities that have been historically underserved in higher education, creating more inclusive learning environments.
 
In this book, faculty and undergraduates describe and theorize about their coauthoring experiences within a variety of institutional contexts including land-grant universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, religiously affiliated research universities, and regional campuses of statewide higher education systems. They explore the relationships between undergraduates and faculty that lead to coauthoring opportunities in a range of courses—first-year writing classes, general educational requirements in various disciplines, and upper-level offerings for English majors—as well as in other institutional spaces such as writing centers, community engagement initiatives, and assessment offices. The collection offers faculty and undergraduates models, ideas, and strategies for how to coauthor together while also preparing them for the challenges—pragmatic, intellectual, and ethical—that they may encounter.
 
Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies showcases why and how coauthorship between faculty and undergraduates is a vital site for scholarly engagement, professional development, and socially just education. It boldly enacts rhetoric and composition’s commitment to collaborative scholarship and is significant for graduate students and faculty in rhetoric and writing studies, especially in community-engaged writing, undergraduate education, collaborative writing, and mentorship, as well as those interested in WAC, WID, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
 
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cover of Collaboration in Practice: Transforming Community-Based Research in the Southwest

Collaboration in Practice

Transforming Community-Based Research in the Southwest

Fumi Arakawa, Octavius Seowtewa, and Dylan Retzinger

University of Arizona Press, 2026

Focusing on the Chavez Cave collections in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Collaboration in Practice presents a study of the partnership between New Mexico State University and the Zuni Cultural Resource Advisory Team (ZCRAT). Rather than centering on artifact analysis, the authors emphasize the collaborative process itself—visiting the site, curating an exhibition, and co-authoring this volume—as a model for ethical and respectful research.
 
The book situates this collaboration within the broader historical and political context of archaeology and museology. It critically explores how museums and academic institutions can shift from extractive practices to ones that prioritize Indigenous sovereignty, knowledge systems, and cultural continuity. Through personal narratives, historical context, and methodological insights, the authors highlight the challenges and transformative potential of working collaboratively. They show how true collaboration requires humility, mutual respect, and a commitment to shared authority in both research and representation.
 
Ultimately, this work charts a path forward for community-based research that centers Indigenous voices and values. It advocates for an archaeology that is not only more inclusive but also more meaningful to the communities whose histories are being studied. A vital resource for scholars, students, and practitioners, this work seeks to engage in ethical, reciprocal, and culturally grounded research in the Southwest and beyond.
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cover of Collaborative Dickens: Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals

Collaborative Dickens

Authorship and Victorian Christmas Periodicals

Melisa Klimaszewski

Ohio University Press, 2019

From 1850 to 1867, Charles Dickens produced special issues (called “numbers”) of his journals Household Words and All the Year Round, which were released shortly before Christmas each year. In Collaborative Dickens, Melisa Klimaszewski undertakes the first comprehensive study of these Christmas numbers. She argues for a revised understanding of Dickens as an editor who, rather than ceaselessly bullying his contributors, sometimes accommodated contrary views and depended upon multivocal narratives for his own success.

Klimaszewski uncovers connections among and between the stories in each Christmas collection. She thus reveals ongoing conversations between the works of Dickens and his collaborators on topics important to the Victorians, including race, empire, supernatural hauntings, marriage, disability, and criminality. Stories from Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and understudied women writers such as Amelia B. Edwards and Adelaide Anne Procter interact provocatively with Dickens’s writing. By restoring links between stories from as many as nine different writers in a given year, Klimaszewski demonstrates that a respect for the Christmas numbers’ plural authorship and intertextuality results in a new view of the complexities of collaboration in the Victorian periodical press and a new appreciation for some of the most popular texts Dickens published.

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cover of Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community: Academic Libraries and Museums in Collaboration

Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community

Academic Libraries and Museums in Collaboration

Alexia Hudson-Ward

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2022

Academic libraries and museums foster many outstanding collaborations supporting teaching, learning, and research within their respective institutions. These collaborations, like other progressive activities, require significant invisible labor, caretaking, and resources that have not always been documented.
 
Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community collects examples of successful academic library-museum collaborations and serves as critical knowledge for the cultural heritage sector. Authors from libraries and museums across the United States demonstrate how to develop and execute partnerships and bring forth new dimensions of transdisciplinary objects-based pedagogy, research, and learning centered on inclusive educational practices. Chapters explore visual thinking strategies and the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education in the undergraduate classroom; restoring Indigenous heritage through tribal partnerships; using object-based teaching to motivate student research; and much more.
 
The collaborative approaches highlighted here demonstrate the power of possibility when two collections-centric entities unite to enrich our collective understanding of materiality, instructional approaches, and the importance of provenance. Cultural Heritage and the Campus Community also illustrates why interrogating past practices and value assignments within academic library and museum collections is essential to advancing culturally relevant approaches to knowledge sharing in physical and digital spaces.
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cover of Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas

Decolonizing Native Histories

Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas

Florencia E. Mallon, ed.

Duke University Press, 2012

Decolonizing Native Histories is an interdisciplinary collection that grapples with the racial and ethnic politics of knowledge production and indigenous activism in the Americas. It analyzes the relationship of language to power and empowerment, and advocates for collaborations between community members, scholars, and activists that prioritize the rights of Native peoples to decide how their knowledge is used. The contributors—academics and activists, indigenous and nonindigenous, from disciplines including history, anthropology, linguistics, and political science—explore the challenges of decolonization.

These wide-ranging case studies consider how language, the law, and the archive have historically served as instruments of colonialism and how they can be creatively transformed in constructing autonomy. The collection highlights points of commonality and solidarity across geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries and also reflects deep distinctions between North and South. Decolonizing Native Histories looks at Native histories and narratives in an internationally comparative context, with the hope that international collaboration and understanding of local histories will foster new possibilities for indigenous mobilization and an increasingly decolonized future.

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cover of Design Integrations: Research and Collaboration

Design Integrations

Research and Collaboration

Edited by Sharon Poggenpohl and Keiichi Sato

Intellect Books, 2009

Design Integrations calls for an innovative rethinking of design education, one that recognizes the changing modes of design and the shifting forms of user experience. The contributors urge new methods of approach that focus on interdisciplinary collaboration between the academic and business worlds. These essays, among the first to focus on the future of design, often in-depth explorations of inter-institutional projects, cross-cultural learning experiences, and a multinational healthcare project. Design Integrations will be of interest to design teachers and practitioners alike.

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cover of First Person Squared: A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy

First Person Squared

A Study of Co-Authoring in the Academy

Kami Day & Michele Eodice

Utah State University Press, 2001

In (First Person)2, Day and Eodice offer one of the few book-length studies of co-authoring in academic fields since Lunsford and Ede published theirs over a decade ago. The central research here involves in-depth interviews with ten successful academic collaborators from a range of disciplines and settings. The interviews explore the narratives of these informants' experience—what brought them to collaborate, what cognitive and logistical processes were involved as they worked together, what is the status of collaborated work in their field, and so on—and situate these informants within the broader discussion of collaboration theory and research as it has been articulated over the last ten years.

As the study develops, Day and Eodice become most interested in the affective domain of co-authorship, and they find the most promising explorations of that domain in the work of feminist theorists in composition.

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cover of Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan

Intimate Empire

Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan

Nayoung Aimee Kwon

Duke University Press, 2015

In Intimate Empire Nayoung Aimee Kwon examines intimate cultural encounters between Korea and Japan during the colonial era and their postcolonial disavowal. After the Japanese empire’s collapse in 1945, new nation-centered histories in Korea and Japan actively erased these once ubiquitous cultural interactions that neither side wanted to remember.  Kwon reconsiders these imperial encounters and their contested legacies through the rise and fall of Japanese-language literature and other cultural exchanges between Korean and Japanese writers and artists in the Japanese empire. The contrast between the prominence of these and other forums of colonial-era cultural collaboration between the colonizers and the colonized, and their denial in divided national narrations during the postcolonial aftermath, offers insights into the paradoxical nature of colonial collaboration, which Kwon characterizes as embodying desire and intimacy with violence and coercion. Through the case study of the formation and repression of imperial subjects between Korea and Japan, Kwon considers the imbrications of colonialism and modernity and the entwined legacies of colonial and Cold War histories in the Asia-Pacific more broadly.
 
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cover of Launching Large-Scale Library Initiatives: Innovation and Collaboration

Launching Large-Scale Library Initiatives

Innovation and Collaboration

Valerie Horton

American Library Association, 2021

The necessity for library leaders to demonstrate that libraries are innovative, collaborative, and can provide eye-catching, transformational services and programs to their communities cannot be understated. But libraries do not suffer from a lack of big ideas. What library workers really need is a roadmap for making those impactful ideas become reality. Based in part on her extensive experience coordinating large-scale initiatives, this guide from ASCLA Leadership and Professional Achievement Award-winning consultant Horton will walk you through formulating and shaping your ideas into sellable, actionable projects. You’ll learn 

  • techniques drawn from project management experts and researchers from many fields;
  • why Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG) are worth your time and effort;
  • guidance on upscaling your idea into a project or service that can be launched at a statewide, community wide, or library consortium level;
  • several case studies of large-scale library projects, with analysis of why they were successful;
  • how to successfully combine foundational principles of innovation with practical methods for collaboration;
  • methods for extending your reach beyond your usual sphere to partner with other libraries and organizations;
  • how to sharpen your skills of persuasion;  
  • no-nonsense advice on leading teams of disparate individuals; and
  • evaluative tips for affirming the project is on the right track and then correcting course as needed.
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cover of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture

Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane

Authorship, Place, Time, and Culture

John E. Miller

University of Missouri Press, 2008

The mother-daughter partnership that produced the Little House books has fascinated scholars and readers alike. Now, John E. Miller, one of America’s leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, combines analyses of both women to explore this collaborative process and shows how their books reflect the authors’ distinctive views of place, time, and culture. Along the way, he addresses the two most controversial issues for Wilder/Lane aficionados: how much did Lane actually contribute to the writing of the Little House books, and what was Wilder’s real attitude toward American Indians.

Interpreting these writers in their larger historical and cultural contexts, Miller reconsiders their formidable artistic, political, and literary contributions to American cultural life in the 1930s. He looks at what was happening in 1932—from depression conditions and politics to chain stores and celebrity culture—to shed light on Wilder’s life, and he shows how actual “little houses” established ideas of home that resonated emotionally for both writers.

In considering each woman’s ties to history, Miller compares Wilder with Frederick Jackson Turner as a frontier mythmaker and examines Lane’s unpublished history of Missouri in the context of a contemporaneous project, Thomas Hart Benton’s famous Jefferson City mural. He also looks at Wilder’s Missouri Ruralist columns to assess her pre–Little House values and writing skills, and he readdresses her literary treatment of Native Americans. A final chapter shows how Wilder’s and Lane’s conservative political views found expression in their work, separating Lane’s more libertarian bent from Wilder’s focus on writing moralist children’s fiction.

These nine thoughtful essays expand the critical discussion on Wilder and Lane beyond the Little House. Miller portrays them as impassioned and dedicated writers who were deeply involved in the historical changes and political challenges of their times—and contends that questions over the books’ authorship do not do justice to either woman’s creative investment in the series. Miller demystifies the aura of nostalgia that often prevents modern readers from seeing Wilder as a real-life woman, and he depicts Lane as a kindred artistic spirit, helping readers better understand mother and daughter as both women and authors.
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cover of Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Literary Couplings

Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Edited by Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

This innovative collection challenges the traditional focus on solitary genius by examining the rich diversity of literary couplings and collaborations from the early modern to the postmodern period. Literary Couplings explores some of the best-known literary partnerships—from the Sidneys to Boswell and Johnson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes—and also includes lesser-known collaborators such as Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland. The essays place famous authors such as Samuel Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats in new contexts; reassess overlooked members of writing partnerships; and throw new light on texts that have been marginalized due to their collaborative nature. By integrating historical studies with authorship theory, Literary Couplings goes beyond static notions of the writing "couple" to explore literary couplings created by readers, critics, historians, and publishers as well as by writers themselves, thus expanding our understanding of authorship.

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cover of Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation

Native American Oral Traditions

Collaboration and Interpretation

Larry Evers

Utah State University Press, 2001

This collection provides a benchmark that helps secure the position of collaboration between Native American and non-Native American scholars in the forefront of study of Native oral traditions. Seven sets of intercultural authors present Native American oral texts with commentary, exploring dimensions of perspective, discovery, and meaning that emerge through collaborative translation and interpretation. The texts studied all come from the American West but include a rich variety of material, since their tribal sources range from the Yupik in the Arctic to the Yaqui in the Sonoran Desert.

This presentation of jointly authored work is timely: it addresses increasing interest in, calls for, and movement toward reflexivity in the relationships between scholars and the Native communities they study, and it responds to the renewed commitment in those communities to asserting more control over representations of their traditions. Although Native and academic communities have long tried to work together in the study of culture and literature, the relationship has been awkward and imbalanced toward the academics. In many cases, the contributions of Native assistants, informants, translators, and field workers to the work of professional ethnographers has been inadequately credited, ignored, or only recently uncovered. Native Americans usually have not participated in planning and writing such projects. Native American Oral Traditions provides models for overcoming such obstacles to interpreting and understanding Native oral literature in relation to the communities and cultures from which it comes.

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cover of Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing

Singular Texts/Plural Authors

Perspectives on Collaborative Writing

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford

Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

"Why write together?" the authors ask. They answer that question here, in the first book to combine theoretical and historical explorations with actual research on collaborative and group writing.



Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford challenge the assumption that writing is a solitary act. That challenge is grounded in their own personal experience as long-term collaborators and in their extensive research, including a three-stage study of collaborative writing supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education.



The authors urge a fundamental change in our institutions to accommodate collaboration by radically resituating power in the classroom and by instituting rewards for collaborative work that equal rewards for single-authored work. They conclude with the injunction: "Today and in the twenty-first century, our data suggest, writers must be able to work together. They must, in short, be able to collaborate."

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cover of Spaniards and Nazi Germany: Collaboration in the New Order

Spaniards and Nazi Germany

Collaboration in the New Order

Wayne H. Bowen

University of Missouri Press, 2000

Using recently declassified documents from Spain and the United States, personal interviews, and unpublished and published Spanish, German, British, and U.S. records, Spaniards and Nazi Germany makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Hispano-German relations during the 1930s and 1940s. This study shows that Naziphiles within the Spanish Falange, Spain's fascist party, made a concerted effort to bring their nation into World War II, and that only the indecisiveness of dictator Francisco Franco and diplomatic mistakes by the Nazis prevented them from succeeding.

Bowen demonstrates that while Spain was neutral in World War II, its policies clearly favored the Axis, at least in the early stages of the war. Franco, who had emerged victorious from the Spanish Civil War in 1939 largely because of support from Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, even carefully considered entering World War II on the side of Nazi Germany.

By the late 1930s, members of the Falange saw World War II as a revolutionary opportunity, a chance to lead Spain into a new age as a partner with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the head of a New Europe of social justice and authoritarian regimes. By the end of 1939, a significant minority of pro- Nazi Spaniards were unhappy that Spain had not entered the war and remade itself to fit better into Hitler's New Order. Bowen argues that support for Nazi Germany in Spain and among Spanish communities throughout Europe was both wide and deep, and that this enthusiasm for the Third Reich and the New Order it promised to bring lasted until the end of the war. Despite statements of neutrality by the Spanish government, the Franco regime was well aware of this collaboration by Spanish citizens as late as 1944-1945 and did little to stop it. Had Hitler been more interested in bringing Spain into his empire, or exploiting the pro-Nazi sentiments of these thousands of Spaniards, he might have replaced Franco with someone more willing to support his interests even as late as 1943.

Spaniards and Nazi Germany presents many possibilities for what might have been a far different outcome of World War II in Europe. It shows that even without the full support of the Spanish or German governments, pro-Nazi Spaniards, even if they did not quite bring Spain into the war, added to the strength of the Third Reich by serving in its armies, working in its factories, and promoting its ideas to other nations.

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cover of Spotted Ponies: The Collected Zines

Spotted Ponies

The Collected Zines

Mag Gabbert, Chen Chen, Tarfia Faizullah, Leila Chatti, and Carly Joy Miller with artwork by Taylor Dolan

Bridwell Press, 2025

Here, within these collected zines, you’ll find enough spotted ponies to fill at least three large stables to the brim. Although, of course, you wouldn’t have much luck coaxing them in there. No, instead, it’s likely because of the free rein they’ve been given, because they’ve been cut loose, that so many spotted ponies seem to have chosen these poems as their breeding ground. We’ve never offered them much scrutiny; never subjected them to any polishing or meticulous adjustments. Each of our spotted ponies simply exists in its natural state, as a product of our own wild abandon.
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cover of Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration

Tarell Alvin McCraney

Theater, Performance, and Collaboration

Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden

Northwestern University Press, 2020

This is the first book to dedicate scholarly attention to the work of Tarell Alvin McCraney, one of the most significant writers and theater-makers of the twenty-first century. Featuring essays, interviews, and commentaries by scholars and artists who span generations, geographies, and areas of interest, the volume examines McCraney’s theatrical imagination, his singular writerly voice, his incisive cultural critiques, his stylistic and formal creativity, and his distinct personal and professional trajectories.
 
Contributors consider McCraney’s innovations as a playwright, adapter, director, performer, teacher, and collaborator, bringing fresh and diverse perspectives to their observations and analyses. In so doing, they expand and enrich the conversations on his much-celebrated and deeply resonant body of work, which includes the plays Choir Boy, Head of Passes, Ms. Blakk for President, The Breach, Wig Out!, and the critically acclaimed trilogy The Brother/Sister Plays: In the Red and Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, as well as the Oscar Award–winning film Moonlight, which was based on his play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.
 
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cover of Teaching through the Archives: Text, Collaboration, and Activism

Teaching through the Archives

Text, Collaboration, and Activism

Edited by Tarez Samra Graban and Wendy Hayden

Southern Illinois University Press, 2022

Disruptive pedagogies for archival research

In a cultural moment when institutional repositories carry valuable secrets to the present and past, this collection argues for the critical, intellectual, and social value of archival instruction. Graban and Hayden and 37 other contributors examine how undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, history, community literacy, and professional writing can successfully engage students in archival research in its many forms, and successfully model mutually beneficial relationships between archivists, instructors, and community organizations.

Combining new and established voices from related fields, each of the book’s three sections includes a range of form-disrupting pedagogies. Section I focuses on how approaching the archive primarily as text fosters habits of mind essential for creating and using archives, for critiquing or inventing knowledge-making practices, and for being good stewards of private and public collections. Section II argues for conducting archival projects as collaboration through experiential learning and for developing a preservationist consciousness through disciplined research. Section III details praxis for revealing, critiquing, and intervening in historic racial omissions and gaps in the archives in which we all work. 

Ultimately, contributors explore archives as sites of activism while also raising important questions that persist in rhetoric and composition scholarship, such as how to decolonize research methodologies, how to conduct teaching and research that promote social justice, and how to shift archival consciousness toward more engaged notions of democracy. This collection highlights innovative classroom and curricular course models for teaching with and through the archives in rhetoric and composition and beyond.

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cover of The Three Cs of Higher Education: Competition, Collaboration and Complementarity

The Three Cs of Higher Education

Competition, Collaboration and Complementarity

Mark O'Hara

Central European University Press, 2019

The thirteen papers in this collection address three aspects of higher education, primarily in Europe but also in the United States. These aspects are competition, collaboration, and complementarity, both on the level of policy and on the practical level of impact on students and staff. Competition, especially for funding, occurs between and within institutions. Collaboration, more than a basic code of conduct, has become a political principle across Europe. Complementarity in the market for higher education facilitates this collaboration. The themes and contexts in higher education for which the three Cs are examined include missions and identities, response to external forces, the impact of evaluation systems and ranking schemes, the effects of globalisation, intercultural awareness and gender imbalance, and the challenges of student participation. Statistical tables and visual aids support the analysis and arguments. This book is the fifth in a series of publications drawn from the annual Forums of the European Association of Institutional Research (EAIR) from 2013 onwards
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cover of The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition

The Wealth of Reality

An Ecology of Composition

Margaret A. Syverson

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Margaret A. Syverson discusses the ways in which a theory of composing situations as ecological systems might productively be applied in composition studies. She demonstrates not only how new research in cognitive science and complex systems can inform composition studies but also how composing situations can provide fruitful ground for research in cognitive science.

Syverson first introduces theories of complex systems currently studied in diverse disciplines. She describes complex systems as adaptive, self-organizing, and dynamic; neither utterly chaotic nor entirely ordered, these systems exist on the boundary between order and chaos. Ecological systems are "metasystems" composed of interrelated complex systems. Writers, readers, and texts, together with their environments, constitute one kind of ecological system.

Four attributes of complex systems provide a theoretical framework for this study: distribution, embodiment, emergence, and enaction. Three case studies provide evidence for the application of these concepts: an analysis of a passage from an autobiographical poem by Charles Reznikoff, a study of first-year college students writing collaboratively, and a conflict in a computer forum of social scientists during the Gulf War. The diversity of these cases tests the robustness of theories of distributed cognition and complex systems and suggests possibilities for wider application.

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cover of Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism

Third Hand

Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism

Charles Green

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

A major reevaluation of collaboration’s role in art since 1968.

The lone artist is a worn cliché of art history but one that still defines how we think about the production of art. Since the 1960s, however, a number of artists have challenged this image by embarking on long-term collaborations that dramatically altered the terms of artistic identity. In The Third Hand, Charles Green offers a sustained critical examination of collaboration in international contemporary art, tracing its origins from the evolution of conceptual art in the 1960s into such stylistic labels as Earth Art, Systems Art, Body Art, and Performance Art. During this critical period, artists around the world began testing the limits of what art could be, how it might be produced, and who the artist is. Collaboration emerged as a prime way to reframe these questions.

Green looks at three distinct types of collaboration: the highly bureaucratic identities created by Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, and other members of Art & Language in the late 1960s; the close-knit relationships based on marriage or lifetime partnership as practiced by the Boyle Family, Anne and Patrick Poirier, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison; and couples-like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Gilbert & George, or Marina Abramovi´c and Ulay-who developed third identities, effacing the individual artists almost entirely. These collaborations, Green contends, resulted in new and, at times, extreme authorial models that continue to inform current thinking about artistic identity and to illuminate the origins of postmodern art, suggesting, in the process, a new genealogy for art in the twenty-first century.
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cover of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism

Treacherous Subjects

Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism

Lan P Duong

Temple University Press, 2012

Treacherous Subjects is a provocative and thoughtful examination of Vietnamese films and literature viewed through a feminist lens. Lan Duong investigates the postwar cultural productions of writers and filmmakers, including Tony Bui, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Tran Anh Hung.

Taking her cue from the double meaning of "collaborator," Duong shows how history has shaped the loyalties and shifting alliances of the Vietnamese, many of whom are caught between opposing/constricting forces of nationalism, patriarchy, and communism. Working at home and in France and the United States, the artists profiled in Treacherous Subjects have grappled with the political and historic meanings of collaboration. These themes, which probe into controversial issues of family and betrayal, figure heavily in fictions such as the films The Scent of Green Papaya and Surname Viet Given Name Nam.

As writers and filmmakers collaborate, Duong suggests that they lay the groundwork for both transnational feminist politics and queer critiques of patriarchy.

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cover of Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Nathaniel Tkacz

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Few virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and carrying more than a whiff of Silicon Valley technical utopianism, openness—of decision-making, data, and organizational structure—is seen as the cure for many problems in politics and business.
 
But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice—and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness—including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through “forking”—play out in reality.
 
The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer.
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cover of Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications

Writing Groups

History, Theory, and Implications

Anne Ruggles Gere

Southern Illinois University Press, 1987

Drawing upon previously unpublished archival materials as well as historical accounts, Gere traces the history of writing groups in America, from their origins over a century ago to their recent reappearance in the works of Macrorie, Elbow, Murray, and others.

From this historical perspective Gere examines the theoretical foundations of writing groups, challenging the traditional concept of writing as an individual performance. She offers instead a broader view of authorship that includes both individual and social dimensions, with implications not only for the teaching of composition but also for theories of rhetoric and literacy.

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