Karen Izod reports on her second workshop with Collaborative PhD students in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary’s College London, as part of their annual induction into collaborative research practices.

This small workshop is designed to support the way in which participants conceptualise and position their work, with view to bringing a more authoritative presence to their projects. Students typically work in a web of relationships involving sponsoring award councils, participating external organisations, and academic stakeholders. Attending to one’s own research requirements is dependent on careful negotiations between these ‘players’ to construct and work in an enterprise capable of meeting multiple interests and needs.

Working from a hypothesis – that negotiation is the management of unique and distributed assets, and collaboration is the management of emerging and shared assets – we experimented with the imagination, empathy and self-discipline needed to claim knowledge and experience as an asset from the position of ‘student’, and to ask that of others.

Working with presence and authority a underpins the Practitioner Certificate in Consulting and Change, and is explored in Mind-ful Consulting , Eds Whittle, S & Izod K. 2009 Karnac books.