Hello darlings!
How is June treating everyone? I hope you are kicking ass and taking names! My June has been… a lot, but I’m really excited about what is going on right now (moving! The sheriff book is moving into production! I got a new dog! I got small western hats for my pets!)
Just a reminder that I’m moving institutions and so MHAWS will come from mhaws.ama@gmail.com in the future – whitelist me, y’all!
Let’s talk about working with other people / knowing yourself / being a part of a team. You know this shit is hard, right? We are all just trying to figure out how to work with other people as we go, feeling it out. No one trains us to collaborate, delegate, oversee, resolve conflict, or ANY of this shit. So we end up in a world where we play stupid games, win stupid prizes (aka get mad at our collaborators and have bad experiences and waste our time).
I’ve been talking to friends and coauthors and frenemies and nemeses about how they work with other people and have come up with a few little exercises that might help you figure out what you bring to a collaborative relationship, what you don’t bring (hi, it’s me, I’m the problem), and what you can do if needed. So here we are: a worksheet (meant to either be done as a self-exploration process or in teams!)
The worksheet has it all – a survey about your attitudes towards some of the pieces and activities associated with producing academic scholarship, open-ended prompts to help you think about your favorite ways to interact with others, your pet peeves (Sorry, I can't see facts through all of my fury), and the lies you tell the team to keep everyone going. Guess what! You can click “printable” at the top and get a nice lil PDF to print and fill out. Or you can make a copy and fill it in on google drive! Or you even… make it your own (gasp!) by copying it and changing any of the questions or categories.
But Mirya, what if I hate worksheets but love quizzes? It’s cool, I gotcha! (Another fucking buzzfeed quiz?? what will become of me once I’ve lost my novelty?)
Just for all my swifties out there… Here’s a BRAND NEW quiz. Please take it so I can say that I didn’t waste the summer of Mirya making buzzfeed quizzes that no one takes! Did you love that? Want more? Well here’s an oldy but goody about your coauthor love language if you missed that one!
Let me know how this goes because — as always — I have absolutely no fucking clue what I’m doing!!
XOXOX
Mirya
This is so helpful! I’ve formed a research trio after we presented very similar ideas (same arguments, different cases) at a workshop and someone said “you guys should do this together!”
The article was accepted to Nations & Nationalism this week! It was the most pleasant and efficient writing process and we’ve got grand plans for a whole new research agenda. I think what helps is that we are at roughly similar career stages, have different case expertise but similar approaches, and love/hate different things.
We met in person as a trio and were shouting ideas at each other. I know sometimes there’s a coauthorship stigma but it’s so much more efficient and fun, with the right team!
The quiz indicated that I am vaguely negative about most things that count as work!