Creating a collaborative autoethnography to navigate our global South/North assembled scholarly subjectivities

Abstract

This article is a collaborative autoethnography of a global South/North partnership between two academics over a period of ten years. We utilise the notion of assembled subjectivity to interrogate our scholarly becomings through experiences of South/North partnerships. Through Arts-Based Research, we create an autoethnographic narrative with the aim of reflecting on power dynamics and tensions we have experienced in various South/North collaborations and partnerships. As South African scholars working across South/North contexts, we understand our scholarly subjectivity as interwoven with and shaped by colonial legacies, historical power imbalances, ethical dilemmas, and continued unequal knowledge exchanges. While we work with and within the global South/North binary, we employ the notion of assembled subjectivity to problematise this binary. In this article, we use a co-created collage called Uncertain Futures to reflect on how our collaborative research projects and subjectivities have changed over time as we moved and worked between different contexts. With this collaborative autoethnography, we contribute to scholarship that foregrounds the messiness and uncertainty that emerge in the everyday lived experience of South/North partnerships. We offer a critical arts-based reflection on South/North partnerships that engage with the difficulty of crossing real and imagined boundaries in scholarship.