Exploring collective writing as a methodology and a praxis for solidarity and hopeful resistance,

Uracha Chatrakul Na Ayudhya, Reader in Work and Organization at Birkbeck, University of London.

Uracha is an interdisciplinary equality and diversity scholar with two decades of teaching and research experience in organizational psychology, organizational behaviour, and human resource management. Her overall research programme focuses on diverse and unequal working lives and how they intersect with social and structural inequalities. As an educator, Uracha holds a deep commitment to promoting social justice through her curriculum, which underpins her critical pedagogical practice.

By sharing two recent projects, Uracha will present collective writing as a methodology for solidarity and hopeful resistance in the act of producing knowledge. The first project is a student-educator ‘writing as resistance’ collective writing project. In this project, students and educator came together outside the formal classroom to experiment with ‘writing differently’, imbued with a desire to enact collective resistance against ‘unnoticed’ and intentionally hidden aspects of the business school curriculum that normalize and reproduce social injustice and inequalities. The second example draws from a writing collective made up of professional service women writing with academic women. By writing together differently as university women workers across the professional service-academic divide, we resist the restriction of who gets to write and make knowledge. Both examples invite the academic community to be more inclusive and creative in how it brings in those outside of academia to be part of knowledge production in a way that offers resonance.

Using dialogical storytelling and visual methods to co-create visions for a sustainable future

 Fabien Littel, Postgraduate Researcher in Organisational Behaviour with the Southampton Business School

Following a 20-year career in various areas of HR in global blue-chip companies, Fabien decided to undertake a PhD in Organisational Behaviour, to further pursue his interest in business ethics, moral agency, and responsible business practices, and move his career into academia. His PhD research focuses on constructing and enacting moral subjectivities for climate change for employees working in the oil & gas industry.

This presentation will share the methods used in experiments of co-creation between actors typically seen as antagonistic: oil and gas industry employees, and climate change advocates, lobbyists, or activists. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work on immanent ethics, and their “rhizomatic” metaphor, this method seeks to go beyond traditional boundaries and sets of moral values, to connect participant at a human level, inviting them to collaborate beyond their seemingly opposed positions. This application of dialogical storytelling integrates collective writing as a way to bring to life individual stories and positionalities as a first step in the co-creation process. From individual stories, it then moves on to the construction of visions of sustainable futures through co-created stories. A visual element is included in the method, through the use of a live artist, not only capturing key aspects of the discussions, but also feeding into the co-creation process. This method facilitated the construction of joint visions from unlikely collaborators, in a way which is transferable to other contexts.