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The February Journal

No. 05The Author Is Dead, Long Live Co-Authors! Collaborative Work in the Humanities

Published October 30, 2025

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  1. A constructivist artwork called 'Földek' by László Moholy-Nagy (c. 1920), it looks like colorful lines intersecting at different angles

    Isabel Bredenbröker, Katerina Suverina, Andrei Zavadski

    Introduction. The Author Is Dead, Long Live Co-Authors! Collaborative Work in the Humanities

    This issue of The February Journal probes into the potential of the collective rather than the individual. How do we share authority, responsibility, and authorship in academic knowledge creation? Why do aggrandizing ideas and expectations relating to the author as a lonely hero (even if it is increasingly a ‘heroine’) remain part of academic expectations and evaluation criteria? What differences exist between artistic collaboration and co-creation in academia? Can collaboration and co-authorship be seen as a tool of resistance against the neoliberalization of academic systems? Indeed, could collaborative work be seen as a/the future of the humanities?

  2. The image shows a work by Ted Kraynick entitled 'Video Luminar Light Mural'

    Juhayna Hilles

    From Vision to Reality. Gyorgy Kepes and the Ethic of Collaboration

    Gyorgy Kepes’s vision of applying art to large-scale public projects culminated in the establishment of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967. Conceived as a laboratory for collaboration, CAVS united artists, scientists, architects, and engineers to foster interdisciplinary exchange and produce socially engaged art using emerging technologies. This article examines how collaboration functioned as a founding principle at CAVS and how artists adapted their practices within an institutional and often ethically charged environment. While the center attracted pioneering artists eager to experiment with new media and technology, collaboration also revealed tensions surrounding authorship, political responsibility, and the influence of military-funded research. Building on Kepes’s lifelong inquiry into the relationship between art, science, and technology, this article argues that the theoretical tensions often attributed to the institutional context at MIT were, in fact, internal to his own theory of visual language, formulated before his arrival at the institute. Rather than treating collaboration as a compromise, Kepes conceived it as a constructive response to instrumentality and as an opportunity to reintroduce human values into systems of science and technology. Through key case studies, including the Explorations exhibition (1970), the political controversies surrounding the 1969 São Paulo Biennale, and later collaborative projects such as Centerbeam (1977), this article demonstrates how Kepes extended the Bauhaus legacy into the Cold War era. Ultimately, CAVS was not only an institutional experiment in art and technology but a laboratory for social imagination that sought to reconcile scientific progress with civic and aesthetic responsibility through the creative potential of collective work.

  3. Elisabeth and Ferdinand encountering their future research partner Angela in the streets of Podgorica.

    Elisabeth Luggauer, Ferdinand

    Fieldwork on Six Legs: Ethnography as Multispecies Experimental Collaboration

    Cayenne, Hester, Torridon, and Doni, to name just a few, have become known not only as dogs present in the everyday lives of the scholars Donna Haraway, Timothy Hodgetts, Karen Lane, and George Kunnath, but also as active participants in their research, thinking, reflection, and ultimately, writing. Thinking with these multispecies companionships, this paper explores the ethnographic techniques of Elisabeth and Ferdinand’s human-dog-entanglement within the research field of human–street dog relationships in the city of Podgorica. The paper elaborates on how fieldwork, guided by multispecies modes of being in a city and in a research field, enables an ethnographic approach that moves beyond the dominance of human sensory and spatial frameworks. Unpacking this example of a multispecies experimental collaboration between a human ethnographer and a canine para-ethnographer, the paper connects the two vibrant bodies of scholarships on multispecies ethnography and ethnographic experimentation.

  4. This image shows a detail of Moses März’s map ‘Collaborations Dance’ (2025), featuring a network of connections between Léon-Gontran Damas and Robert Desnos

    Moses März

    Mapping Collaborators Dance. An Artistic Research Inquiry into the Decolonial Potentialities of the Surrealist Archive

    Collaborators Dance is a large-scale hand-drawn experimental mapping of collaborative constellations loosely associated with surrealism. The research is inspired by the spirit of solidarity pervading this historical movement, leading to many of its protagonists deliberately crossing some of the big categories of difference they inherited from colonial modernity, such as race, nationality, gender and class, as well as professional categories such as artists, academics and activists. The map seeks to offer an image for this kind of intersectional collaboration. Instead of celebrating the genius of individual artists, it addresses the question who had to work with whom for their work to take up radically transformative potentials. In addition to providing insight into the main considerations, questions and intentions driving the artistic research process that informed the drawing of the map, the article provides an example for the way in which the map can be read from some distance and from up close, as an image and as a text. The latter approach is performed via an engagement with a section of the map that is dedicated to the friendship between two poets, Léon-Gontran Damas and Robert Desnos, who are respectively considered to be key figures in avant-garde and Négritude history. The specific qualities of artistic research and of experimental cartography in engaging with this archive are discussed on that basis.

  5. The image presents a textual collage symbolizing layers of nuance and meaning

    Katie Grant, Maxwell Hyett

    Collaborative Nuance: Citation, Difference, and the Friendship of Roland Barthes and Michel Deguy

    The works of Roland Barthes and Michel Deguy are each marked by the inclusion of friends and lovers, expressing a shared resistance to the norms of impersonal, impartial critique and scholarship. Following Barthes and Deguy’s affectionate position, this article troubles the limits of scholarly citational practices by identifying latent collaboration in the sources and language shared among friends. The incomplete record of Barthes and Deguy’s friendship is complemented by a brief sketch of their pursuits of nuanced, indecisive writing, especially evident in the handling of pre-texts like lecture notes and conference talks. The ongoing exchange between this article’s co-authors—preceding and including this collaboration, and, similar to that between the two French thinkers, written and spoken in various forms and proximities—explains and performs the generative nature of Barthes and Deguy’s joint commitment to difference, as shared expertise and political alignment are bracketed in favor of social postures and the possibility of playful connection. A reading of Barthes’s late attraction to the haiku and Deguy’s commentary on this development puts forth poetic or fictive language that is distinct from the arguments and language systems of philosophy, a significant matter as they each pursue nuance in mourning. Taking these systems to be presently and perhaps necessarily incomplete, the co-authors gesture to a collaborative practice that is drifting and active, privileging the social over ‘loyalty to the idea’ as the basis of creativity and community.

  6. Drawings representing Campo San Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, obtained with a Camera obscura (detail), Canaletto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Canaletto4fogli.jpg)

    Elly Selby

    That Which Withers in the Age of Digital Production: Towards a New Model of Authorship

    While authorship has historically tethered individuals to works for both credit and responsibility, its foundations in originality, genius, and singular authority have eroded in the face of technological, cultural, and disciplinary disruptions. Poststructuralist critiques reframed authorship as interpretation and circulation, while digital networks and user-generated content democratized participation, only to reintroduce anxieties around ownership and protection in the era of AI. Against this backdrop, I propose a reconceptualization of authorship as a social process involving humans and nonhumans, rather than an evaluation of form. ‘Relational Authorship,’ a new concept introduced in this article, departs from traditional authorial criteria of style, signature, and veracity by emphasizing accountability within distributed production. This article examines these outmoded formal criteria to establish the necessity of this new model of authorship. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, poststructuralism, and post-humanist thought, the model situates authorship as socially and materially embedded, where contributions extend across audiences, institutions, and algorithmic systems. While in disciplines such as architecture authorial hierarchies are sustained through frameworks of liability and regulations, Relational Authorship critically considers how responsibility might be reconfigured in the company of humans, machines, and the networks that bind them.

  7. Brief Context: The Anlo Ewe concept of Nugbidodo (reconciliation) is central to maintaining social order and spiritual harmony. Within Anlo Ewe cosmology, ancestral favor is hinged  on social harmony. As such, it is believed that unresolved conflicts and misunderstandings provoke ancestral displeasure, manifesting as communal ill-health, potential calamities, or collective misfortune. Consequently, the practice of Nugbidodo is employed at all levels of society—within families, clans, married couples, and chieftaincies—to resolve disputes. The Nugbidodo rite is mostly performed by chiefs and elders who mediate and resolve disputes. This essential process of conflict resolution and reconciliation is a fundamental prerequisite for the successful celebration of the annual Hogbetsotso festival among the Ewe people.  Image description: Design process for body art on a young performer ahead of a funerary procession in honor of the late Torgbui Tenge Dzokoto Gligui VI during his burial ceremony at Anyako in the Volta Region of Ghana on the 29th of May 2021. Young girls whose bodies are decorated like this mostly perform during the Hogbetsotso festival. They usually accompany the entourage of chiefs in a procession and perform traditional dances, hence the need to pay their last respect to the chief of their village in a funerary procession to accompany him transition into the afterlife. Though the title of the image is not directly related to the actual Nugbidodo rite performed by Ewe elders, we are using the expression in relation to our peculiar situation—in a more abstract context to symbolize reconciliation, interdependence, and the significance of team work.

    Sela K. Adjei, Douglas J. Falen

    Promises and Challenges of Collaborative Teaching: Crossing Cultural and Academic Boundaries

    This is a retrospective essay about the experience of collaborative teaching across cultural and academic boundaries. The authors reflect on their miscommunication and the process of reconciliation as a model for the promises and challenges of decolonial collaboration. While obstacles remain to collaboration between African scholars and those in other countries, the authors argue that an open-minded approach allowing for vulnerability and personal growth presents a hopeful option for overcoming barriers and exposing students to new ways of learning in the face of enduring inequalities and differences. The authors offer an account of the history of their interactions, beginning with some uncomfortable exchanges and failed collaboration, but leading to more encouraging, collaborative teaching and scholarly endeavors that give them hope for centering African perspectives, challenging hierarchies, and providing meaningful learning to students in Africa and Europe/North America.

  8. It is a blue sofa with the phrase "It was hard to get here. Rest here if you agree" written on it.

    Isabel Bredenbröker, Tajinder Kaur

    Dis_ability, Ethnographic Methods, and Collaborations over Distance: Intersectional Complications

    Based on their chapter ‘On giving, taking, and receiving care: Fieldwork and dis_ability,’ collaboratively written for a handbook entitled Inclusive Ethnography (Procter and Spector 2024), India-based anthropologist Tajinder Kaur and Germany-based anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker reflect on writing about dis_ability and ethnographic methods from their respective points of view and experience. Their conversation, conducted entirely in writing into a shared Google Doc over a period of two months, takes core methodological takeaway points of the chapter as a starting point to think about how we can write and think together over distance: Isabel and Tajinder have never met in person. What challenges do we face when writing and thinking from intersectionally different perspectives for a global academic publishing market? What solidarities can be learned anew and differently through these kinds of collaborations? These challenges, particularly when combined with disability studies and anthropology, require special attention. Working together, Kaur and Bredenbröker show that writing across intersectional differences—whether in lived experiences, geopolitical contexts, or disciplinary approaches—requires an ethics of care that goes beyond strategies of knowledge production.

  9. Librarians standing behind a bookcase in the early 20th century

    Christina Bell, Gina Levitan

    There Are Some Things Just Not Worth Doing Alone: A Reflection on Peer Mentorship among Librarians That Centers the Whole Person

    In this reflexive essay, we assert that truly collaborative work is built from supportive peer networks that are about more than professional development or successfully navigating the field, particularly in academic librarianship. Academic support departments and services like the library, tutoring, and the writing center have long encouraged students to develop supportive, collaborative relationships as part of their success. We now seek to consider how we can encourage similar structures for professionals that extend beyond the demands of professional growth to an ethos of professional care. This reflexive essay will present our experiences creating and sustaining such supportive peer networks at several levels of our careers. We will discuss what has and has not worked for each of us in both staff and faculty positions and how we propose that early career scholars cultivate their networks for sustainable, ongoing care and success.

  10. You see the cover of the book 'Performanzen & Praktiken. Kollaborative Formate in Wissenschaft und Kunst.' In the image, a man is standing still, while his shadow is dancing in the spotlight.

    Jonas Tinius

    Book review. Schuchardt K and Spieker I (eds) (2024) Performanzen & Praktiken. Kollaborative Formate in Wissenschaft und Kunst

    This is a review of Performanzen & Praktiken. Kollaborative Formate in Wissenschaft und Kunst (‘Performances & Practices. Collaborative Formats in Science and Art’), edited by Katharina Schuchardt and Ira Spieker (Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2024). The volume situates itself within a German lineage of collaborative anthropology and empirical cultural research while contributing to wider debates on practice-based and multimodal work beyond the discipline. The book invites its readers to dwell in the awkward, generative spaces, where anthropology continues to reinvent itself through experimental practice. 

  11. The cover of the book ‘Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East’ features an industrial landscape at dusk.

    Tatiana Smorodina

    Book review. Donovan V (2025) Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East

    This is a review of a recent monograph by Victoria Donovan entitled Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East (Daunt Publishing, 2025). The book focuses on the Ukrainian South, also known as the Donbas macroregion. The Donbas is among the most complex and under-researched areas of Ukraine, long relegated to the periphery of scholarly and public attention. Drawing on fieldwork and employing methods of urban and oral history, Donovan seeks to dismantle the colonial and Soviet-era clichés that have shaped perceptions of the region. Her work reimagines the Ukrainian South through a nuanced lens, foregrounding the local knowledge holders.