The notion of crossing borders is omnipresent in academia. It includes expectations for researchers to foster interdisciplinarity, to value international collaboration, to leave the “ivory tower”, as well as to push the boundaries dividing arts and sciences. These discourses ironically reinstate boundaries, as crossing a boundary requires that boundary to be envisaged as real and crossable in the first place. Decolonial and feminist thought reminds us that boundaries are neither natural nor ahistorical but imposed by the side that controls knowledge (Mignolo, 2014). Thus they are not impenetrable barriers but “contact zones” that may also function as “time-spaces of mediation and negotiation” bringing into copresence knowledges and practices, as well as their agents, across the abyssal lines marked by inequality (Santos, 2014, p. 227). Another notion in feminist decolonial thought - crossroads - conceptualises a generative form of ‘being’. Anzaldua (1987) imagines the meeting of different cultures in a person, ‘being a crossroads’ that creates a new consciousness to perceive reality, the self, and actions. This emerging consciousness can overcome the binaries that created “the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our language, our thoughts” and requires “a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness” (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 49). 

As three researchers raised in socialist societies on the outskirts of Europe, and educated and working in academia in the Global North and West, we dwell at the crossroads of different cultures. Our institutions are located in an unequal position in the global political economy and knowledge production. Within these institutions we have in various ways encountered the coloniality of knowledge which has prompted us to construct a space for what Tlostanova and her colleagues (2016, p. 2) have termed “collaborative praxis as a methodological and theoretical intervention”. We thus engaged in a long-needed dialogue among ourselves, and many colleagues and artists from the former state socialist Europe and beyond, to bring into conversation the wavering and generative ways of being post-socialist subjects. 

Collective biography, in our research, is a post-structuralist and decolonial auto-inquiry, which aids us in fracturing conversations by referencing untold social, political and personal histories and the diversity of places and conditions in which post-socialist subjects dwell. It aids us in interrupting the dominant developmental narratives that portray post-socialist spaces and academics as lagging behind. 

We have reached to childhood memories and started re-search from our own multiple positionings to explore “our own body-politics and geopolitics of knowledge, being and perception” (Tlostanova et al., 2016, p. 5) as post-socialist scholars in multiple contact zones. Our aim is to “destabilise and erode the established and fixed geocultural, disciplinary and epistemic models, be they Western, non-Western, Northern or Southern” (Tlostanova et al., 2016, 216). Eroding, however, does not stop at critique as a form of deconstruction, exposure, or even purification. Whereas this form of critique is necessary for understanding oppressive structures, including the ones that we ourselves are subjected to and complicit in, it is also a reminder that things could have been “otherwise”. However, “otherwise” is in danger of disappearing in this form of critique unless it is “affirmed” (Raffnsøe, Staunæs and Bank, 2022). Affirmative critique  intensifies both cognitive and affective forces that are “already stirring in the examined” (ibid., 10).

Inspired by decolonial and feminist thinkers, our research attemped to bring the ‘otherwise’ into copresence and create “another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 102). These culture-making practises are the focus of our presentation. 

We approached collective biography as an ethical space of inquiry instead of a method. It became “a way of thinking through interactions between bodies, things, places and feelings” (Gannon et al., 2019, p. 50) to explore and share the so far untold stories and to disrupt undesired knowledge production practises. We started from the premise that collective biography as a post-structural and decolonial space may provide us with a possibility to create real alternatives to the contemporary academy as an institution fostering individualism, extractivism, competitiveness, and narrow specialisation. First, we sought to create a collectivity - both as planned and coincidental - to erode individualism and competition. Second, building on diversity and difference as the commonality in the collective, we attempted to flatten hierarchies and inequalities, and to bond without the demand to erase differences. Third, we foregrounded interdependence and ethical obligations toward the more-than-human in our ways of travelling, dwelling, consuming and sharing. Fourth, through conversations we identified common matters of concern (Stengers, 2018) and inquired through reading, thinking, feeling, breathing, listening, glances, bodying, conversing, as well as through art and silence (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Gannon et al., 2019; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012). Fifth, within the collective biography spaces, we sought to generate through intentional ‘relational labour’ (Gannon et al., 2019) an atmosphere of both joy and humour, but also safety and humility that allowed us to become vulnerable. Our readings on slow research (Stengers, 2018) and care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) helped us to create kind spaces for inquiry (Derrick, 2020) in which potent research means were barely noticeable. At the same time, with a keen awareness and hindsight, we recognised in hard wired hierarchies, stereotypes, anger, envy, disappointments and expectations the stronghold of matrices of colonial and neoliberal capitalist power (ZIN & Gannon, 2022). These generative, tense, even conflicting affective and energetic fields created the dynamism and mechanics of our collective intellectual work. Inquiry happened within the folds of our multiple beings as children protagonists, narrators of childhood memories, and scholars interpreting stories, multiplying the geopolitical and bodypolitical locations from which to speak and sense the world (Burman & Millei, forthcoming).

Privileging neat categories and reductionist thinking has defamiliarized researchers from the realities of the complex world, leading to its catastrophic destruction (Stengers, 2018). Thus affirming and learning from that “what escapes general, so-called objective, categories” is an act of not only knowing the world “better”, but acting in and with the world otherwise to remind us of and nourish its irreducible plurality. In other words, the research practices discussed here are not ‘just’ about childhood, the Cold War, and the multiplicity of experiences that have so far escaped scholarly attention. They are about acknowledging and engaging with “the irreducible and always embedded interplay of processes, practices, experiences, and ways of knowing and valuing that makes up our common world” (Stengers, 2018, p. 120). In our own situated and particular ways, we thus cultivate not only a different kind of sociological knowledge but also a different kind of the world to live in. This echoes Sheila Jasanoff’s (2004) core notion of co-production, suggesting that “the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it" (p. 2). We conclude that how we produce science underwrites the world not just through the knowledge we contribute, but also - and crucially - through the means we choose to bring that knowledge and relationships into being.

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