Collaborative Research

The purpose of this article is to share some reflections on the long research experience I have developed with circus artists in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. These reflections revolve around the question of the contributions of social sciences, particularly anthropology, through research practices conducted in collaboration with artists. I am interested in rethinking the role of the researcher by understanding science from a conception in which commitment, collaboration, and participatory knowledge-building can potentiate research practices and, at the same time, create dilemmas and challenges. What are the theoretical-methodological implications of the roles we can play throughout a long research process? What are the tools we can use when conducting research on the fields we also participate in, socially and politically? How can we reconcile the time it takes to conduct academic work with the short amount of time it takes for events to unfold in real-time?

A collaborative project has been initiated to develop a standards-based, comprehensive technology infrastructure that will enable encoding and dissemination of interoperable, electronic clinical practice guidelines (CPG's). Three key deliverables of this large scale ($18M), 3-year project include: An interoperable guideline model, a guideline authoring/encoding workbench, and a guideline deployment system. Our approach will be to employ and extend existing informatics standards, and to collaborate closely with standards development organizations. The project methodology will build on earlier efforts in this field, and will be driven by requirements specific to supporting active deployment of guideline content within clinical information system (CIS) workflow.

A collaborative research effort among construction companies has allowed the design and implementation of a performance measurement system in Chilean construction companies. This effort is starting to give preliminary results as new companies are adopting the system that is expected to reach critical mass in the Chilean construction industry. In the future, international organisations are expected to join this effort to extend the potential impact to new countries and companies. The system database will be useful to develop third party benchmarking to contribute to the improvement of the industry as a whole. The implementation of performance measurement systems, which include measures adapted to lean construction, is discussed in this paper. The paper discusses the development process, the performance measures selected and some implementation issues. The paper also shows some preliminary findings from the baseline data obtained from the companies and projects already included in the...

In the present paper, it is attempted to empirically verify the impact of economic liberalization on the R&D behaviour of Indian pharmaceutical firms controlling for the effects of several firm specific characteristics including firm size. The results from the Tobit analysis for a sample of firms over the period 1989-90 to 2000-01 indicate that competitive pressure generated by liberalization has worked effectively in pushing Indian pharmaceutical firms into R&D activity. A host of firm characteristics like firm age, size, profitability, intangible assets, export orientation and outward foreign direct investment are also found to be important determinants of innovative activity in the industry. The study suggests several policy measures to further indigenous technological efforts of pharmaceutical firms, which include, removing obstacles that inhibit outward orientation of firms, providing special scheme for small size firms in the overall technology policy for the industry, intensi...

Purpose – Increasing pressure to enhance research coupled with a desire for a broadening of academic input, are prompting greater levels of collaboration. Research collaboration can generate notable benefits but can also pose a variety of challenges. The purpose of this paper is to explore the reasons, facilitators, benefits and challenges of academic collaboration. It also provides suggestions to manage identifiable risks and enhance team dynamics. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual paper exploring prior literature in relation to the contentious points of research collaboration, particularly in regard to authorship attribution. Findings – The authors present two checklists that researchers can utilise to ensure the successful completion of collaborative projects. The checklists incorporate the main factors required for effective collaborative work and research, and form a foundation for discussion among team members. Originality/value – The paper draws upon experien...

Collaborative methodological approaches, increasingly popular within anthropology, emphasize the need to build meaningful engagements with participants that include them more deeply as partners in the process of research, from inception to textual representation. In this article I engage with methodological debates about collaboration to argue for greater disciplinary and narrative openness about the modes of relational detachment and disconnection that emerge within fieldwork collaborations. Through a series of reflective fieldwork vignettes, I consider three types of collaborative detachment. These include how the diverse and competing relational obligations within fieldwork can shift collaboration into the terrain of collusion and complicity, how participants may demand a detached stance as a preferred mode of engagement, and how the conflicting effects of anthropological engagements on participants’ life projects may demand of us ethical modes of detachment. Through these examples, I argue for a more nuanced debate about the politics and ethics of detachment within collaborative anthropology.

Many existing building performance analysis methods and tools do not effectively encourage and facilitate iterative, multi-criteria, and multi-agenda building design development. SEMPER, which was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), is a building design and performance simulation environment that attempts to remedy these shortcomings. It is an active, multi-domain, space-based, object-oriented design support tool for integrated building performance computing.

This paper applies the theoretical constructs of collaboration to tourism destinations and offers insight into interorganizational collaboration for one specific tourism domain, the planning and development of local, community-based tourism destinations. Drawing primarily from the literature on interorganizational relations, the theoretical constructs of collaboration are discussed first. Challenges and considerations in the planning and development of local tourist destinations are then summarized, followed by examples of community-based collaboration research. Propositions are presented for guiding collaborative initiatives and for investigating the application of collaboration theory to the planning and development of tourism destinations, from a community-involvement perspective.L'article applique les constructions théoriques de la collaboration aux destinations touristiques et jette de la lumière sur la collaboration interorganisationnelle pour un domaine particulier du tourisme: la planification et le développement communautaire des destinations touristiques locales. On discute d'abord les constructions théoriques de la collaboration en faisant appel à la littérature sur les relations interorganisationnelles. On résume les défis et les considérations de la planification et du développement des destinations touristiques locales, et on donne ensuite des exemples de recherches sur la collaboration communautaire. On présente des suggestions pour guider des initiatives collaboratives et pour investiguer l'application de la théorie de la collaboration à la planification et au développement des destinations touristiques dans un contexte communautaire.

By applying New Regionalism Approach, this paper delves into a rather unexplored area of regionalism (higher education) in a less investigated region (Southeast Asia) and state (Philippines). It treads through a relatively recent terrain of bridge-building between higher education and regionalism. Through in-depth interviews and document analysis, the exploratory study investigates how ASEAN regionalism has influenced the cross-border research of a Philippine university. Examining cross-border research sheds light on the dynamics of ASEAN regionalism as research is considered crucial to the formation of a knowledge society, which, in turn, serves as a potent tool to pursue regional and national objectives. The findings of this study demonstrate that the ASEAN higher education regionalism offers vital mechanisms to enhance the university’s research performance and its overall competitiveness in an era of globalisation. However, in spite of these advantages, there are ideational, political and material challenges that pose limits to this potential. This paper argues that cross-border research has not yet been robustly activated as a mechanism for regional and national pursuits, and that the points of collaborations and contestations are still to be addressed adequately to maximise the promises and mitigate the perils of ASEAN higher education regionalism.

The dissertation’s aim is to explore the everyday relevance media artifacts have for young children. It discusses and further develops analytical concepts that are committed to taking the children’s perspectives on possibilities and limitations of such artifacts seriously. These conceptual developments are rooted in the author’s participation in a daycare practice in Berlin, Germany. The daycare’s situational approach precisely attempted to draw on the children’s everyday life experiences so as to engage in problem-oriented learning projects, on media artifacts and beyond.

When analyzing the situated problems the children experienced in relation to both the pedagogical-educational arrangement of the daycare as well as subjectively relevant media artifacts, it emerges that their personal struggles are connected to broader societal contradictions. For instance, their problems with specific artifact-arrangements are interrelated with the staff’s, the parents’, and the researcher’s struggles. Children’s struggles with media artifacts are therefore not analyzed in isolation, but as part of the daycare’s sociomaterial interplay.

The dissertation explores and analyzes this interplay, so as to conclude that sociomaterial arrangements must be understood as inextricably intertwined with the process of conducting everyday life. Sociomaterial arrangements such as media artifacts are maintained and transformed by all practice participants. They all contribute in unique ways to upholding and changing jointly shared arrangements through conflictual collaboration, irrespective of their age. Daycare and other learning institutions should therefore systematically promote collaborative explorations of media-related struggles across age thresholds.

The behavioral and public health sciences both have a long and rich history supporting basic, translational, and applied research aimed at improving human lives and reducing human suffering. Through the complementary expertise of these disciplines, investigators have contributed to significant, worldwide improvements in mental and physical health. Further gains can be achieved through collaborative research among scientists in these 2 fields. Unfortunately, there are a number of barriers to such collaboration originating in different intellectual traditions, research methods, and the structure and values of academia. We identify these barriers and potential strategies for overcoming them. Several areas for future collaborative research appear promising, especially comorbid mental and physical disorders, adherence to interventions, stigma, and emotional processes. Theory-guided preventive interventions may represent especially fertile areas of collaborative effort. KEY WORDS: mental ...

The League of European Research Universities (LERU) organises a summer school each year at one of the member universities on a different theme, inviting PhD students from Europe's top research-intensive universities. This year's LERU summer school was organised around the theme of collaboration in research, with the aim of developing a guidebook for early career researchers including tips and advice for successful collaborations.

In 2012 I set up a series of theatre workshops as part of a larger research project using a variety of arts and creative techniques to carry out a methodological investigation into the interior and imaginative lifeworlds of migrants. A group of actors and researchers were joined by three young Egyptian migrants in a workshop using drama exercises to illuminate the ways in which they formed stories to narrate their lived experiences. This piece discusses the impact of distorted media discourses around migration and the ways in which audio-visual, performative and textual anthropological representations of migration can be used to highlight the political responsibility of bringing people’s experiences, aspirations, contradictions and voices into the public realm.

In this position paper we discuss research into tools for software maintenance, where tools include everything from large scale integrated CASE products down to simple one-function commands or features. The objective of this research is to learn more about software engineers' work with and needs for tools, so that they can become more productive. We discuss several categories of questions to be asked in this research, and various methods for gathering data. We present some data from our research to date which indicates, among other things the need for efficient software exploration mechanisms. Finally we propose some directions for collaborative research. Keywords: Software maintenance tools, work practices, studying software engineers 1. The software maintenance topic and problem we are addressing A key part of our research is to study tools to help software engineers (SEs) perform maintenance. In this paper, we discuss the problem of understanding what tools and tool features...

The a im of the Discovery Challenge workshops held d uring PKDD conferences is to encourage a collaborative research effort when analyzing real world d ata. For PKDD'99 and PKDD2000 two d ata sets were available; from the financial and from the medical domain, for PKDD2001 o nly the medical data a re used. There a re two b asic

The effect of the individual analyst on research findings can create a credibility problem for qualitative approaches from the perspective of evaluative criteria utilized in quantitative psychology. This paper explicates the ways in which objectivity and reliability are understood in qualitative analysis conducted from within three distinct epistemological frameworks: realism, contextual constructionism, and radical constructionism. It is argued that quality criteria utilized in quantitative psychology are appropriate to the evaluation of qualitative analysis only to the extent that it is conducted within a naive or scientific realist framework. The discussion is illustrated with reference to the comparison of two independent grounded theory analyses of identical material. An implication of this illustration is to identify the potential to develop a radical constructionist strand of grounded theory.

‘More then Just Food’ is an important book for those interested in community organisation, community food networks, food justice and community-based collaborative research methodologies. A key strength is Broad’s story-telling approach, which is derived from his immersive research experiences. This enriches both the book’s readability and the depth of knowledge offered. Important themes are returned to over the chapters as our understandings of CSU and related organisations are layered up within different contexts. Some readers may find this approach results in some chapters not being clearly defined from others. However, the book not only contains a wealth of information about community food movements in South Los Angeles, it also tells the story of contemporary food economic and policy atmospheres generating the need for community based work. Whilst this gives much useful detail, a greater focus on decision making processes and examples where internal conflict is dealt with within CSU, would have been valuable for others working in this field.