Interdependence Benefits Independent Scholars
by Janet Salmons
I was cleaning up my office bookshelves and came across The Independent Scholar’s Handbook. I have no recollection of when and where I obtained it, but it was a bit of kismet to discover it now, when we are focusing on research beyond academia. I was struck by the timeliness of the book, originally published in 1983. I immediately searched for the author, and he agreed to a Methodspace interview.
I resonated particularly with two chapters of the book. In “Friends Learning Together: Working with Others,” Gross encourages us to find fellow scholars and mentors, and to cultivate intellectual partnerships. A later chapter emphasizes why this is important: “You Need Not Be Alone to Be Unique: Interdependence Among Independent Scholars.” He points out:
Gross suggests that the danger of working without feedback or idea exchange is remedied when we see our independent work as interdependent. I could not agree more! When we are independent and work remotely, we have to make the effort to find colleagues and build relationships. Building the kind of trust that allows for candid dialogue and meaningful mutual support takes time. We might feel we are too busy, or that such communication is a distraction from completing the immediate project. From my perspective, that is short-sighted and counter-productive.
Last October Natalia Reinoso Chavez and I recorded this conversation for the NVivo online conference. We wanted to share our experience of collaboration. We are not currently collaborating on a specific project. We are friends learning together. We are different ages, from very different cultures and places. She is excited to form a friendship with me because she has read my books. I am excited to form a friendship with her because I am intrigued by how she overcomes daunting challenges to do meaningful research. In the process, we have discovered shared non-work passions such as art journaling.
Natalia is an independent researcher and scholar from Bogotá, Colombia. Regular readers might recognize her name, because she gave an extraordinary presentation about research ethics and her studies with remote Indigenous and Afro-Colombian people in a Methodspace webinar. In a typical situation, our interactions would have been concluded when the project was completed. Instead, we continued to find reasons to chat. Hear our thoughts about the value we both feel from our personal and collegial friendship. We both hope you will be inspired to make new friends!
More Methodspace posts about collaboration
Anna CohenMiller helps us drawing on the 4C's of research: Compassion, Community, Care and Collaboration into our research praxis to develop as individuals and researchers.
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This collection of open-access SAGE journal articles includes a variety of perspectives on collaborative research and writing.
Julie Reeves discusses some important points about internal and external collaborations in this interview and post.
Getting started with a new collaborative project? Think about approaches for working with others within a group, intra-group collaboration, or across groups, inter-group collaboration.
Research and writing can be solitary activities. This post from Natalia Reinoso Chávez follows one by Janet Salmons about how two independent researchers have found value in collaborative friendship.
Some barriers to collaboration identified in business relationships can help us think about how to prepare for potential obstacles to success in collaborative research or writing projects.
Dr. Majbritt Lyck-Bowen offers suggestions for collaborative research assignments that include everyone in an online class.
The Director and Assistant Director of the Bass Connections program at Duke University share lessons learned and open access resources for team success in interdisciplinary collaborative research.
Big Data can mean the research is too big to conduct on your own. In this post, find four types of research collaborations involving Big Data, with open-access examples.
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Interested in Indigenous methods? Find the webinar recording and related resources in this post.
Researchers often collaborate with community partners, as discussed in this guest post from PhD candidates from Duke University’s Cultural Anthropology and African American Studies programs.
The focus for October 2022 is on collaboration. What do we mean when we use this term?
Learn about the multidisciplinary and research-focused business writings from a Spanish perspective in the open-access Business Research Quarterly.
Learning while doing: collaborating on a book about collaboration.