Friend and Foe Final Draft

8/9/2019 Friend and Foe Final Draft

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I felt rather shocked, and experienced asense of loss, which is a reflection of howmuch I had valued her contributions. AndI echo the feeling that this is a change tomy sense of collective identity and to ourpotential as a group. Talking about it asour group doesnt quite feel right now.

Above all we need to revisit our

ethical considerations in relation toeach other and the emergence of

social ghosts that are more than each

other or indeed the sum of our parts,as Gergen would say.

Whether the theme touches onmissing motherhood or loss of anysort, there is bound to be some pain.But my own feeling is that anycollaborative writing should be ableto work creatively from pain as wellas pleasure.

During our next meeting we had to find a way to adapt our practice to comply with data protection. We felt we had nooption but to post our writings under a pseudonym each. This would give us all permission to talk freely about our his-tories while preserving anonymity. We agreed we could continue e-mailing the group to announce new postings. Inthe event this was not necessary. Only one of us ever attempted to present new writing on Blackboard again. Some-body quietly suggested that we reverted to communicating via e-mail so as not to let Blackboard stifle creativity. Thiswas greeted with a surge of support for structures that sustain, not structures that contain, us. There followed a poemabout motherhood, e-mailed to the group with a note that, intimately personal as it was, it could never have gone upon Blackboard. And then summer came and went; and with it went any commitment to Blackboard.

In September 2005 we planned a whole day together, starting with a writing workshop based on Goldbergs (1990)ideas. The workshop consumed most of our day and was felt to be a very constructive use of our time.

It has felt as if we were communicatinginto a space that held no immediate con-

nections. Our virtual spaces are just

store cupboards, filing cabinets and mes-sage boards. Our use of Internet tech-

nologies, apart from the odd e-mail flur-ries, has been archival and functional

rather than continuous and creative. It

has been a dead store and notice-board, not a live exploration space.


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More than three months and sixty e-mails later we met again. In December 2005 we made a commitment to engaging with Da-vies (1997) collective biography practices. After the process of talking and writing and reflective witnessing comes re-writing andthen critical listening: listening for resonances, for talk that sings, for places where the story becomes non-specific and usesgeneral language, for moments when the story becomes less vivid and cannot be imagined and for language that evokes and/orembodies memories. This seemed to represent a critical collaborative writing and editing process that built on our witnessingpractices (indeed, the experience swept most of us off our feet). For the first time in more than a year, detailed notes from thismeeting reached us all as an e-mail attachment.

Something very memorable happened for

me in this meeting: a sense I was part of ourincreasing sense of connection and Iwasnt feeling self-conscious. This was akind of plugging in to a new form ofenergy; a working, wanting, creating sort ofenergy, that seemed to be building on itselfand I wanted to just give it a bit of a push, abit of myself, every now and then.

I couldnt get this experience out

of my mind so I ended up penningsome further thoughts on our

conversations and e-mailing them

to the rest of the group.

As we worked together in a criticalcollective editing way we found meaningin finding meanings and enrichingmeanings and that was special.


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Well, who would have known, that in the

end it was our frustration withelectronic technologies that called for

more frequent face-to-face meetings....

... that it is our meetings whichseem to have facilitated ourcollective sense of identity andfeeling of belonging...

...but that it is thanks to technology thatthis has now found an expression and canbe communicated to others.


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