A candid thread by an early career academic based on the desire for collaboration as in my experience and stories shared by other younger activists & researchers of how epistemic communities and movements working on wicked problems are defined by divisions.(1/5)

While our egos are fragile the problems we attempt to understand are complex and wicked. What would happen if we could move past our sometimes petty issues to find ways to share space on equal terms and engage in dialogue about our differences.

We are living through a pandemic, the climate crisis looms and populism takes its ugly roots, as communities that seek to have an impact for change why don’t we have space for everyone at the table driven by the desire for similar change instead of internally fragmented attempts?

While collaboration should never be coercive, why don’t we reimagine collaboration as an opportunity to articulate conflict and remain uncomfortable in our differences? Collaboration should not always mean compromise but the ability to sit with tensions and work through them.

Collaboration should also mean letting go of power in shaping discourse and leaving that space and room for those who have been Invisibilised in these communities, movements whether they be women, people of colour, Dalits, Bahujan, Adivasi among others to shape it.

Collaboration as a community may require us to move past cancel culture, while many things should never be accepted and must be called out. Cancelling should still leave an avenue for engagement with the spirit to hold them accountable.

We need to be respectful of younger voices. Collaboration and community should require depth of experience to be matched by the freshness of insight and ability to shake things up that younger researchers, activists and others bring to a community.