CASS Collaborative Cultures Program

About:

Collaborative Cultures is an initiative of the College of Arts and Social Sciences (CASS) at the Australian National University. Our work seeks to initiate, enable, sustain and amplify collaborative practice at the university. Our emphasis is on the practice of collaboration: the contexts in which we collaborate; the work we undertake when we collaborate; and the challenges, often unspoken, that can arise when we collaborate.

Over 18 months across 2020/21 we conducted research within the college to develop an understanding of how collaboration is practiced, and what helps and hinders collaboration within the institution. From this research we developed a set of twelve Problem Statements, which describe specific barriers to collaboration, and six Key Themes that recur throughout the problem statements and other data.

Two initiatives have been implemented to address these problems and key themes.

• Collaborative Practices Lab, a peer-learning program supporting collaborative practitioners to navigate the themes and dynamics of collaborative projects.
• Collaborative Practices Salons, informal gatherings for exchanging reflections and perspectives on collaboration, and an experiment in building a community of collaborative practitioners.