Collaborative Writing, Collage, and Cooking: From Humanist to Post-Humanist Assemblages

• Published in: Composition studies Vol. 50; no. 1; pp. 47 - 184
• Main Authors: Bawarshi, Anis, Reiff, Mary Jo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago University of Massachusetts Boston 22.03.2022; University of Cincinnati on behalf of Composition Studies
• Subjects: Art Products; Authorship; Collaboration; Collaborative Writing; Elbow, Peter; Human subjects; Humanists; Scholarship; Sensory Experience; Teaching Methods; Writing; Writing Processes
• ISSN: 1534-9322

William Duffy, Beyond Conversation: Collaboration and the Production ofWriting In the spring 1999 lead article of Composition Studies, titled "Using the Collage for Collaborative Writing," Peter Elbow offers collage as a method as well as a form for encouraging writers to compose/think/reflect in conversation with each other. Figure 1: A collage of our collaborative cooking depicting the intra-action of texts (recipes, lists), material objects/tools (knives, plates, forks, ingredients), humans and non-human actants (the coauthors in the kitchen, at the stove), and technologies (pen and paper, smart phone). Yet here, and echoed in the 1999 Composition Studies article on collage and collaboration, we find the deeply humanist perspective that guides so much of Elbow's understanding of collaboration as an interaction between individual human subjects, whether a form of weak collaboration, where writers' individual responses to and from one another "influence each others' thinking and writing," or strong collaboration, which "requires agreement or consensus" among individual collaborators (10, emphasis in original). Thinking about the collaborative practice of writing together in relation to/ alongside cooking draws our attention to the deep relationality at work in both, a relationality that is epistemological as well as ontological, involving "knowing with" (Broudy 12) not just each other as collaborators, but also knowing with objects such as recipes, cookbooks, ingredients, the physical space of the kitchen, utensils, bowls, pans and pots, timers, and the stove.