Sustaining and transforming collaborative research : principles and practices

It is much easier to talk and write rhetorically about the benefits ofcollaborative research than it is to enact those benefits in the actions and outcomes of a sustainable research team. This is hardly surprising: all manner of obstacles confront those seeking to conduct and publish research in contemporary Australian universities. Some of these obstacles are institutional and systemic, such as academic work intensification and heightened accountability and surveillance. Perhaps even more significant are the challenges related to the conceptual, ideological and phenomenological dimensions of research teams. Yet these obstacles and challenges must be confronted if genuinely sustainable and potentially transformative researchteams are to occur. This chapter distils several selected principles and suggests associated practices of sustainable and transformative collaborative research, which in turn constitute a framework for interrogating the examples of collaborative research outlined in the subsequent chapters in the book.