Co-writing: Part 2

Academic writing requires courage. Not least when doing so in collaboration with others. An aspect of co-writing is that it involves another academic reading your texts in an unfinished – sometimes extremely raw – condition. There will be awkward sentences, unfinished thoughts, less than fluent English and incoherent text segments. The kind of stuff most academics wouldn’t want to show anyone. In this respect, most joint writing projects occur in constellations characterized by a great level of trust. The project undertaken by Isak Hammar and myself, which I wrote about in the first part of this series of blog posts, was one such constellation. 

The second co-writing project I want to discuss was of a slightly different nature. This was a collaboration with sustainability researcher Anna Kaijser. At the time, we didn’t know each other all that well. We had gotten to know each other during a PhD course in 2012 and had since interacted sporadically. In the spring of 2015, we ran into each other by chance at an informal lunch with Norwegian STS-scholar and environmental historian Kristin Asdal. 

During this lunch, we discovered that our postdoc ideas clearly had some things in common. Anna was interested in Scandinavian environmental youth organizations. I was interested in the emergence of modern environmentalism during the years around 1970. Anna suggested that we should write something together. Why not adopt a historical perspective on an environmental youth organization? Perhaps Nature and Youth Sweden (Fältbiologerna), which she had been involved in when she was young? 

To ensure that this idea would actually materialize, we decided to schedule a project day before the end of the semester. The plan was that we would discuss our ideas but also start to familiarize ourselves with a possible empirical material. We decided to order some twenty volumes of the magazine Fältbiologen from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. We booked a room at the University Library in Lund and started reading. We relatively quickly started to find interesting things. 

In particular, our attention was caught by the young activist Erik Isakson. He was all over the place in the material. In the 1960s, he climbed trees and led a series of adventurous expeditions. Toward the end of the decade, he became an editor and took an active part in the environmental debate. Then he vanished. A few years into the 1970s, he made a comeback. It turned out that he had accepted the consequences of his critique of civilization and moved to Greenland! 

Our plan was to study how Nature and Youth Sweden was affected by, and itself influenced, the Swedish ecological turn. Our hope was that Erik Isakson could serve as a common thread. That the larger process of change could be made visible through his life. After our day at the library, we scheduled a new meeting after the summer. The plan was that we would then draw up the guidelines for what our article might look like and where we should submit it. 

Our second project day was also carried out at the library. We then agreed upon a rough structure for the article and who should write what. The plan was to start in the present with the struggle in the Ojnare Forest on the island of Gotland going on at the time. Nature and Youth Sweden played a prominent role in this conflict. On the basis of this, we wanted to address questions on how environmental youth activism has developed historically. We also decided which texts to analyze in more detail and made copies of these. 

Some good things had also transpired between the two meetings. I had been given a two-year postdoc position in Lund and Anna the same kind of position in Linköping. Here, a large environmental humanities environment was taking shape. It came naturally for us to carry out our study within the framework of these two positions. That is why we didn’t find it necessary to apply for smaller project grants. We were ready to start working. At the same time, we had both planned quite a lot during the fall. As a result, the actual writing was postponed until the spring of 2016. We decided to focus on a historical journal and to write in English. We decided on Scandinavian Journal of History. 

Just like Isak Hammar, Anna had written her thesis in English. This made me feel more confident. It meant that my English could be straightened up by someone else. We also made it clear from the outset that we would adopt a more relaxed attitude vis-à-vis our text. Step one was to create an outline. Step two was to prepare a first draft. Only then had the time come to edit, tighten up the text and try to write more eloquently. This worked out well, not least as Anna had previous experiences of co-writing. 

Our text turned into a manuscript during the spring, but before we submitted it, we made sure that it was read by others. Here, we used our various networks to get perspectives from both the field of history as well as from environmental humanities. I was very pleased to travel to Linköping and present our text at their higher seminar. This was attended by senior academics such as Jonas Anshelm, Johan Hedrén and Björn-Ola Linnér. Academics whose texts I had carefully read but whom I had never met. 

After having incorporated comments from our readers, the time had come to submit our manuscript. Anna took care of this as I was about to go on parental leave. We got the text back in various stages and had to make quite a few changes. Among other things, the role of Erik Isakson was toned down and Ojnare Forest didn’t make it to the final version. We talked about our work on the phone, but Anna was responsible for the major revision efforts. I would once again like to stress the advantage of being two authors during the review process. It really makes it much easier not to take criticism personally and to come up with good solutions. 

Another stage where this form of dual authorship proved valuable concerned disseminating the text. I took Anna to the national history conference in Sundsvall and she invited me to the Science and Technology History days in Norrköping she was organizing. It was great presenting our research together and fun to better get to know each other’s acquaintances. 

By writing together, we became friends. Our joint project was never a major track for either of us. But it was a very meaningful, interesting and instructive project. The finished article, “Young Activists in Muddy Boots: Fältbiologerna and the Ecological Turn 1959–1974,” was finally published in the summer of 2018.

This is the second part in the blog-series "Co-writing". Read the first part here.

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Time for a history conference!

Tomorrow, I’m traveling to Växjö along with some 400 other academics to participate in a national conference for Swedish historians. This national conference is organized every three years and serves as an important venue for various kinds of historians. If you’ve been in the field for a while, as I have by now, it serves as an opportunity to socialize with friends from all over the place and see what’s going on in the field. This has not always been the case. 

My first conference was in Lund in 2008. I had just been admitted as a PhD student, but had not yet started working. The only person I knew was Isak Hammar, who was in the same position. We mostly kept to ourselves, exchanged a few words with people we knew as teachers and supervisors and attended a few sessions to watch and learn. I didn’t take the initiative to talk to anyone by myself. 

Yet I felt special and chosen. I had become a PhD student! During my undergraduate years, I had been told that this was virtually impossible. A dream had come true. I would get paid for four years to work with history. I would have the opportunity to write a thesis. A book! For me, all of this was incredible. Socially, I had also received a new identity. When someone asked me what I was doing, I could now answer “PhD student in history.” The reactions I got from the people around me were quite different from “I study history.” 

My second conference was in Gothenburg in 2011. At this time, I was more at ease in my role as a PhD student. I was comfortable in my home department. It was large and there were many PhD students. Once at the conference, I spent time with the people I knew. Isak and I had scheduled a session in which we would present our thesis projects. It was slotted for 8 a.m. the day after the large conference dinner. The audience consisted of four PhD student friends from Lund, a retired journalist and someone who had entered the wrong room (who left as soon as we started talking). I really didn’t feel like one of the gang. 

The next conference was held in Stockholm in 2014. At this time, I had received my PhD, I had temporarily been assigned lecturer, received some attention and – as faithful blog readers may remember – become more humble. That spring, I was also on parental leave and socially cut off from the academy. Intellectually speaking, I felt like a vegetable. I was scheduled to participate in three sessions and was quite nervous about this. The result, however, was pretty good and I felt – perhaps for the first time in a conference setting– that I fit in. During my stroller walks, I had thought a lot about my career options. Perhaps I should become a teacher? But in Stockholm, it became clear that what I truly wanted to do was to try to become a historian. In any case, I had to give it a chance. 

A few months after the conference, Johan Östling called me. He told me that he was going to try to start up something called “history of knowledge” and asked if I wanted to be involved in preparing a major application. I had never encountered the term history of knowledge and found it a little vague. But I said yes without hesitation. This is something I have not regretted. 

My fourth conference was in Sundsvall in 2017. It was a busy conference. I organized two sessions, spoke at a third and was also involved in an infamous roundtable conversation. At this time, I had also started to look at conferences in a new way. In the past, I had mainly participated to gain intellectual impressions and learn new things. Now, I saw it more as an opportunity to get to know people. I had a list of people with whom I hoped I would have the opportunity to talk. Academics whose texts I had read and wanted to get to know better. I succeeded in doing this and I am glad that I had worked up the courage. 

The other thing I wanted to try in Sundsvall was to bring people together who I knew but who didn’t know each other. The two sessions I organized – one on the history of the perception of the future during the post-war period and one on the ecological turn around 1970 – were thus already successful by bringing the panel together. The audience that attended and the interaction that took place were nothing but a bonus feature. This is an area I truly don’t yet master, but I have at least gotten better at introducing people to each other. 

Perhaps one may sum up my experiences from Sundsvall as being the first time I “used” the conference media. I have greatly benefitted from what I learned from this conference in recent years and in a number of other contexts, not least international ones. Conferences are what you as a participant make of them. The ten to fifteen minutes when you present something represent a minor element. Their purpose is to facilitate interactions and conversations. It took me a long time to finally come to realize this. Almost a decade.

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Co-writing: Part 1

One of the best learning experiences you can have as an academic is to write together with others. This is a good way of getting a concrete insight into how you may work and write in ways other than yours. I started co-writing in earnest in the spring of 2016. That semester, I was working on three simultaneous projects with three different colleagues: Isak Hammar, Anna Kaijser and Johan Östling. These projects came to cross-fertilize each other and ended up being a crash course for me on researching and writing together. In a three-part series of blog posts, I will thus discuss these collaborations and what I learned from them.

The first project was carried out together with Isak. We knew each other very well. Between 2008 and 2013, we were both PhD students. We took the same courses and shared offices. We then taught together and were even on parental leave at the same time. Our basic views of historical scholarship and our attitude toward the academy were similar, even though our empirical research interests differed.

Isak wrote his thesis on antiquity, while I focused on the period from 1600 up until the present. After receiving his PhD, Isak became interested in classical reception studies (i.e., how people have used and related to classical antiquity throughout history). I, on the other hand, studied the breakthrough of environmental issues in Sweden in the 1960s. There were no obvious shared interests between us. Sometimes, however, you discover unexpected things.

One of the actors I was interested in was diplomat Rolf Edberg, who published his environmental classic Spillran av ett moln back in 1966. This book is characterized by an ecologically holistic perspective that was uncommon at this time. When reading the book, I noticed that Edberg drew a significant number of parallels between the environmental crisis of his time and the fall of the classical civilizations. I pointed this out to Isak and had him read a few selected passages. After that, our project was up and running.

The first step in the writing process was to prepare a brief application for research funding. In relation to this, we acquainted ourselves with international journals focusing on so-called classical reception studies. Many of these were to a great extent characterized by literary studies, but in one of them – International Journal of the Classical Tradition – we found a couple of articles we could somewhat relate to. We wrote in the application that we were going to submit an article to this journal. After having waited for six months, we received a positive reply from the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation.

But the step from writing applications to focused research time was steep. It took almost a year before we could both free up enough time. During this period, we both did totally different things. I remember that in the late fall, we started to worry about whether we could get something done. Did we really have enough material? Would any of the journals be interested?

Nevertheless, we finally decided to schedule a few weeks where we could fully focus on the project. We returned to our application and re-read Edberg’s book. Somewhere around this time, we realized that we had somehow already made quite a bit of progress. The application felt like a manual. We just had to do the things we had included there.

We brought different skillsets to the project. Isak wrote fluently in English, thus significantly improving the quality of the language used in my drafts. Obviously, he also wrote the section on classical reception. He also arranged for his American colleague Dustin W. Dixon to help us with a critical reading before we submitted the article. As far as I was concerned, I had experiences from peer-review processes and could easily place Rolf Edberg’s book in an environmental history context.

We arrived jointly at the structure of the article. We had meetings where we discussed what to write, which were then followed up by individual writing. We divided our empirical ideas between us. One thing I noticed during this process was that Isak – unlike me – wrote more organically. He could not say in advance exactly what he would arrive at. This was something he discovered during the actual writing. I, on the other hand, had clearer ideas in advance and my writing was not as creative. It was very informative to see these differences appear when working on the same material!

Our manuscript was completed during the spring, after which the review process followed. Here, being two authors was definitely advantageous. The comments we received proposed quite substantial changes. Among other things, a specific empirical section (which I had written) did not appeal to the reviewers at all. But the very fact that we were two authors made it easier not to take this personally. We discussed the comments, formulated a plan for how to respond and which changes to make. This included aspects such as entirely getting rid of the above-mentioned empirical section.

Our revised version was accepted, and in the summer of 2017, the article “A Classical Tragedy in the Making: Rolf Edberg’s Use of Antiquity and the Emergence of Environmentalism in Scandinavia” was published. Whether it has made any impact on the international scholarly community is unclear, but we were probably onto something. The fact is that when Gustaf Johansson presented his thesis in Uppsala in 2018, he showed with even greater clarity that many people in the 1970s made sense of the environmental crisis by turning to classical antiquity.

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