In this paper I will refer to my personal and academic experience of writing collaboratively with colleagues across different disciplines, countries and institutional affiliations acroos Europe and beyond. I will think-with authors located within Posthumanism (Braidotti, 2011, 2013, 2018), New Materialism (Bennet, 2010) and Post-qualitative theories and methodologies (Lather & St.Pierre, 2013) who challenge the traditional view and practice of academic discourses, particularly in relation to academic writing. I will refer to my personal experiences of writing some papers for academic publication with colleagues across different disciplines, opening therefore a space for dialogue and for new meanings to emerge at the crossroad of different fields of inquiry and of different national boundaries.

I will particularly think-with the work of Richardson and St.Pierre (2005) in their view of academic writing as a creative and disruptive practice that destabilizes traditional, fixed academic structures in favour of rizhomatic and multiple experiences where the poetic and the playful replaces the objective and the quantifiable. Through the work of Holman Jones et al.(2013), of  Gale and Wyatt (2021), I will paly with the idea of a collaborative voice, where the individual position get lost in between a diffractive multiplicity of voices. Diffraction (Barad, 2007; Lambert, 2021) , a key concept within Posthuman theories and practices, is also a guiding principle in my writing and in my presentation, whereby diffraction is conceived as a concept borrowed from quantum physics where the multiplicity of voices and positions, like waves in their interaction with each other or with an obstacle, loose their individuality in their merging into one new entity. Diffraction is not just a reflection of each other into each other's voice, it is rather a juxtaposition and a merging of different perspectives. It is not 1+1=2, but rather 1 with1= multiplicity, where the thinking space becomes a relational and creative inquiry, highlighted through a sense of togetherness and of withness.

Collaborative writing will be proposed throughout this paper as an alternative, poetic and evocative (Kirkcpatrick et al, 2021) way to conceive and to practice academia differently (Bozalek, 2022); as a way to resist a neoliberal discourse that places productivity and quantity over quality and beauty. Collaborative writing will be proposed also a 'learning' possibility beyond the traditional conception of teacher education as a mere development of skills and as a quantifiable training through a set of frameworks. Proposing in this way  an alternative view of research, possibly starting from teacher training, research that is entangled with practice, with identity, with embodied and lived experiences that matter and that we care about. A practice-research that is grounded on the value of ourselves as individuals beyond the professional domain that considers us solely as a means of production.

The paper will also draw from psychoanalytical theories, particularly in relation to object-relation theories that position relationality at the centre of identity formation in the work of M.Klein, Winnicott and W.Bion, through which collaborative writing can be seen and read as a transitional space for learning and for approaching education differently.

In this paper I refer to the practice of auto-ethnography and of collaborative auto-ethnography through the work of Homes Jones et al. (2013) and of Gale & Wyatt (2021) as a methodology that places the 'small' and the personal as data at the centre of academic investigation. By doing so I embrace the notion of 'warm data' (Bateson, 2016) as opposed to 'big data' and of personal stories that matter, stories that we care about and that we handle with care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2016). This is a proposal of 'undoing traditional methodology thinking-with the work of Donna Haraway (1988, 2016), Jane Bennett (2010), and Rosi Braidotti (2011, 2018, 2019), I embraced the belief that the situated, the embodied, the lived and the personal story holds a political dimension and a vital subversive power to destabilise dominant discourses. With our collaborative writing-practice I propose the idea that our stories matter and that they can pave the way to other stories to matter.  

This paper proposes an alternative way of conceiving academic writing and proposes this as a possible practice to be included in teacher training and in research collaborations across different countries, fields of studies and institutions.

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