A Recipe for Successful Collaboration: Shared Creative Work Experiences (SCrWE) Among Co-Researchers

Abstract

In this article, we discuss our home cooking school as one example of a strategy we call "Shared Creative Work Experience" (SCrWE, pronounced "screwy"): Planned, playful extra-research activity during which collaborators engage in and reflect on creative work (e.g., cooking, sewing, painting, building, writing, performing, designing, gardening) that yields a product of some sort (e.g., a meal, a quilt, a painting, a shelf, a poem, a play, a game, a communal garden). Through SCrWE, we argue, collaborators playfully but deliberately create disequilibrium, shift perspectives, and unsettle power dynamics, ultimately preparing for productive, meaningful research partnerships. By creating a space for co-researchers to experience shared creative work, we aim to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions and invite co-researchers to embrace ambiguity together. Grounded conceptually in aesthetic experiential play and the notion of the social imagination, SCrWE helps research teams identify potential sources of substantive, procedural, and affective conflict and then explore these conflicts in productive ways. Using techniques of collaborative autoethnography, we weave together recipes, photos, and scholarly writing to illuminate our experiences. We conclude by describing the steps for developing a SCrWE and include reflective questions to help research team members uncover their ontological, epistemological, and axiological commitments, ultimately leading to more meaningful research partnerships.