Abstract

Communication is at the centre of each RMA’s work. It is THE tool to implement projects, support researchers, interact with stakeholders, other units, every day, all the time. It is the prerequisite for collaboration. If communication between collaborators is successful, there is often a great sense of joy in working together, a sense of mutual understanding and trust. If communicating with each other is difficult, collaboration is challenging, if not impossible at times. As a consequence, collaborators might feel overwhelmed, insecure, misunderstood, and angry – and so do research managers and administrators themselves. While emotions are inevitably part of human life, the question is how we, as RMAs, manage feelings in and across groups in ways that foster both mutual respect and enriching collaborations?

Cecilie Glerup, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (DK), and Mo Horstmann, Research Services, University of Helsinki (FI), are both working as RMAs in interdisciplinary research environments. We share the experience that communication in multi-/inter-/transdisciplinary groups is often the most challenging aspect of our collaborative work and it causes friction. Not only do project members have different disciplinary backgrounds, they also speak different "disciplinary" languages. Disciplinary and/or professional hierarchies add to the complexity of collaborations. As RMAs, we are not only naturally at the interface between research and administration, we can also find ourselves in the middle of a whirlwind of emotions that come out of having interdisciplinary discussions about how to do the research. We anticipate the whole spectrum of feelings such as compassion, care, and inferiority/superiority, anxiety, joy, etc. – ourselves and with others. But how are these feelings managed in (interdisciplinary) collaborations and by whom? How can we address emotions in relation to communication between disciplines and even professions? How can we understand the relations between emotions and collaborations? Do formal and informal structures we work in allow for emotional engagement?

We aim to have insightful conversations about performative emotions in our RMA working environments. Management of emotions is closely linked to the big topics of care and work well-being, however, – perhaps related to the ethos of the scientific profession, where it is a merit to be objective and not guided by emotions – the role of emotions, how to manage them, and how they relate to scientific collaborations is a theme that is rarely discussed neither in RMA practice nor in e.g. science studies literature.

In the fifteen-minute discussions, we will first define some terminology related to communication and emotions in collaborations (so that we speak the same language!). We imagine that the central concepts to talk about could then be ”management of emotions”, “ambivalence”, and “relations between emotions and collaborations”. We realise that this topic inherently carries with it a heavy load of feelings and stories, of course. Therefore, we will experiment with formats for discussion that both allow for sharing of stories and for moving between specific stories and broader reflections on the overall topic.