ABSTRACT
Much contemporary research involving collaborative knowledge creation draws on post-structuralist and action research traditions. Both traditions are engaged with questions of social practices, both aim at questioning norms and existing (meaning) structures, and both seek social change; but they also work with different ontologies which underpin different understandings of the ‘social subject’. In this chapter we would like to invite the reader to consider some of the tensions and complexities in play when post-structuralist, non-realist understandings of the self co-habit with realist essentialist self-narratives in processes of joint and dialogic knowledge production. When we cross paradigms and move within the normativities of everyday ‘taken-for-grantedness’, how should notions and relations of self/other, I/thou, I/we be understood and handled? If what we strive for is the inclusion of multiple knowledge forms and knowledge producers, how can we as researchers talk and write about ourselves and the others and the knowledge that we ideally produce through collaboration?
