Abstract

"Collaboration, or Collaborators?"

Andrew Popp, Copenhagen Business School (ap.mpp@cbs.dk)

Collaboration is positioned as an academic virtue. But in wider culture collaborators are often positioned as morally ambiguous, complicit, potentially corrupt. Can intense collaboration with our sources seduce us into complicity? In my presentation I explore what happened – and the mistakes I made – when I was confronted with disturbing information in a source. First, I was tempted by the very free approach I was taking to the process of writing into believing I could take risks with a challenging piece of evidence. Having obtained these sources from a family member of the source creators and having discussed the disturbing information with that family member, I believed I had done due diligence. My first readers stripped me of my bravado. My response was an overelaborated act of. That simply had a deadening effect. Next, I expunged all mention of this one piece of evidence, rationalizing it as peripheral to story I had conceived as the one I wanted to tell. That was hardly a satisfying solution. I wanted to write what I thought of as an intimate history of economic life, but in my intimacy with the sources found myself seduced into complicity with them and their creators.