About

As initiatives for more diversity in the cultural field are gaining ground and migration becomes an increasingly important issue on the political agendas of many countries around the world, this project examines the ways in which transnational collaborations create spaces for literary participation of migrants. Situated at the intersection of international relations, comparative literature and business economics, COLLAB analyzes collaboration from a threefold perspective: 1) as a political strategy in civil society that enhances intercultural exchange and the social integration of migrants through collective storytelling, 2) as a form of co-authorship between migrants and other writers with different cultural backgrounds that gives voice to stories of migration that would often be lost without their translation, 3) as an alternative economic model consisting in peer-to-peer support that brings new voices to the publishing industry. Focusing on a broad range of non-profit organizations, collaborative texts by amateur and professional writers and crowdfunding initiatives that help make migrant voices heard through literature, the project seeks to understand how collaboration changes the cultural field and impinges on migrants’ agency. It shows how actors and institutions that are traditionally perceived as belonging outside the cultural field are crucial players in redefining notions of authorship rooted in individual and national singularity. Challenging strict distinctions between textual and contextual dynamics, COLLAB highlights the social embeddedness of literature and builds an original framework for understanding the thematic and formal implications of transnational collaboration in literary texts. While borrowing theories and methods from other disciplines, COLLAB confidently reorients the social sciences towards the project’s center of gravity, the literary text, and shows that literature is an important tool to understand broader societal transformations.

Lines of research

COLLAB follows four intersecting lines of research:

  1. Transnational collaboration in civil society: This research strand focuses on small-scale writing projects in European cities that foreground migration and multilingualism, and whose mission consists in shaping debates around migration and belonging, promoting intercultural dialogue between writers through literary collaborations such as creative writing workshops. This part of the project combines literary and political theory with social and cultural anthropology and is grounded in qualitative methods, field research and textual analyses.
  2. Authorship and poetics: This line of inquiry explores how co-authorship between migrants and other authors with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds redefine how literature is made and who counts as an author. By shedding light on the mechanisms by which collaborative transnational texts are produced and stories of migrants are mediated, COLLAB investigates to what extent linguistic and cultural power asymmetries have an impact on literary form and content. The project traces recurrent narrative, thematic and stylistic patterns across a wide range of texts and outlines a poetics of transnational collaboration from a comparative perspective.
  3. Circulation, publications systems and the sharing economy: This line of investigation examines the publication and circulation systems of transnational collaboration, with a focus on the sharing economy. Methodologically, this research uses digital humanities tools, notions of business economics and critical theory to map the connections between crowdfunding and migration and assess the impact of collaboration on the human rights market.
  4. Collaboration as a research method: COLLAB promotes collaboration as a tool for interdisciplinary research. The team members’ different theoretical and methodological backgrounds are a challenge and a blessing on which we will reflect in our upcoming blog. The project also highlights the importance of bottom-up approaches for knowledge production and scientific innovation, while redefining literary studies as an expanded field of research that confronts relevant societal questions in conversation with other disciplines with no obvious affinities.