Productive discomfort: negotiating totality in collaborative digital narrative practice

Working as a collaborative writing team, there are many different power structures at play influencing what stories can be told and how they are told. Creative practitioners must negotiate these power structures if they are to work productively as collaborators. Looking at the collaborative process through a Levinasian lens provides new insights into the complex nature of how power structures affect the narratives produced by collaborative teams and how creative practitioners can work towards more ethical and productive collaboration.
This study examines the process of producing the digital narrative, We See Each Other, as part of a collaborative writing team from my perspective as one of the creative practitioners. Interview and field note data is drawn upon to analyse the ways in which Levinas’s notions of totality and infinity played out in the creative process revealing that productive collaborative relationships are formed when collaborators experience transcendent encounters with one another. Analysis of the creative process also reveals the often-blurred line between totality and infinity, making working toward these transcendent encounters challenging. Working towards ethical collaboration therefore involves learning to work alongside totality, a process conceptualised in this paper as ‘productive discomfort’.