Performing a ‘collaborative self’

This chapter focuses attention on emotions, expertise, and ethics as foundational elements for exploring feelings, skills, values, and mind-sets in the context of collaboration. A ‘collaborative self’, then, is ‘performative’, because it is the product of multiple interacting factors-individual, discursive, and situational-affording identity to actors and practices. It explores how feelings, skills, and values interact with each other and with other factors to constitute ‘a collaborative self’. The chapter also focuses on actors and how they are constituted in collaboration in order to provide greater insights into how and why actors use their emotions, expertise, and ethics in making collaborations work. Ethics offers value-based answers to questions about why to collaborate and how. Decisions to collaborate are made in the context of how collaboration might contribute to or detract from important values, including democracy and the protection of individual rights. Emotions are of interest in studying collaboration less for what they are than for what they do.