An International Interdisciplinary Writing Group Perspectives on Building Partnerships and Developing Community

In this chapter, we describe our international collaborative writing group (ICWG), which came together in 2012 and reconvened in 2017 to share experiences, renew friendships, and reflect on past memories and expectations. This group formed a micro-community of practice that has celebrated successes while simultaneously being cognisant of differences in views, direction, and output. While we initially only ‘signed up’ for a writing collaborative project five years ago, we discuss what keeps us coming together – in small groups as well as the whole – for further writing projects. Using Personal Construct Theory (PCT), we discuss how we have built a learning culture for our group. We reflect on what aspects of the collaboration, including ways the initial writing group was structured and supported, have invited us to continue to come back to the wellspring of collaborative work. We bring international perspectives on what being part of a writing group means beyond the simple output of scholarly work to interrogate what has allowed us both to be a community of practice, and to practice as a community.