While many departments, research institutes and universities offer a fertile ground for intellectual collaboration and mutual support structures, like-minded scholars also happen to work outside these formal frames, often hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers away. In this blog post, we reflect upon how a group of ten scholars writing joint articles based on individual research became what we currently call the emerging Polička Collective: a spatially dispersed and interdisciplinary alliance of scholars interested in diverse and community economies in Eastern and Central Europe (CEE) and the Former Soviet Union.

In this blog entry, we reflect upon what made our encounters possible and provide insights, perhaps only short glimpses, into the processes of creating a convivial atmosphere, on the one hand, and the planning as well as execution of collaborative writing efforts in between relatively short physical meetings and long periods of spatial dispersal, on the other hand. Rather than offering a blueprint for how to grow organically into a spatially dispersed scholars’ collective, we trace this genealogy with one main goal: we hope this self-reflective account can provide helpful insights for other collaborative projects and collectives, especially since both creating a convivial atmosphere and writing collaboratively remains often tacit and embodied knowledge among participants in collective projects.

Despite the tendency that internationalized collaborative projects are increasingly regarded as stimulating, there remains little guidance on how to grow together. We will make explicit some important rules of conduct, methods and activities that helped us in working together, narrated in a somewhat chronological order for the sake of simplicity.

Read the full text on the Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde blog.