The Space Between: Relational Foundations of Collaborative Knowledge Worth Making

This essay is a scholarly argument in the form of an imagined letter to a promotion and tenure committee—never requested, but necessary. It contends that collaborative, co-authored scholarship is not a lesser form of academic production, but its most rigorous and ethically grounded expression. Drawing on cognitive science research demonstrating that thinking is fundamentally social, and centering Indigenous scholars who have asserted this truth for generations before Western science had language to name it, the essay argues that institutional processes privileging single-authored work reproduce the very logics of extraction, individualism, and epistemic colonialism that relational research seeks to disrupt. Through engagement with co-authored works centering synergistic conversations, epistemologies of family, Indigenous research methodologies, and Projects in Humanization, this essay calls on promotion and tenure committees and university structures to reimagine what counts as scholarly worth—and to recognize that the most consequential knowledge emerges not from solitary thinking, but from the generative spaces held between people in genuine relation.