Collaborative practices in dance research: unpacking the process Sherrie Barr* Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre & Dance, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA (Received 28 June 2014; final version received 16 September 2014) This essay explores the numerous and diverse ways collaborative practices in dance research can unfold. Strengths and challenges within the collaborative pro- cess are discussed as emphasis is given to the multiple perspectives and types of relationships that evolve from and within the process. These core elements offer scholars a rich array of choices that can enhance research endeavors as well as inform pedagogical practices. Unpacking collaboration in this manner carries particular relevance in a world that is as global as it is fragmented, underscoring the need to understand collaboration not as a specific research methodology but as a dynamic process. Examples in dance science, choreography, dance educa- tion, and pedagogy are considered to illustrate the possibilities collaboration holds for future research queries. Keywords: collaboration; research practices; dance education; critical feminist pedagogy; choreography; dance science 1. Introduction Dance researchers – theoreticians, artists, and educators alike – engage in a world that is increasingly complex, a landscape that is as disjointed as it is interwoven, global yet fragmented. With boundaries containing domains of knowledge dissolving and new horizons appearing (Lather 1991; Bolwell 1998; Marques 1998; Shapiro 2008), today’ s world seems to defy definition. No longer can there be one best way of thinking or perceiving in what has become known as the postmodern world (Lather 2004). It is a landscape that simultaneously demonstrates the dangers of disconnecting from the larger world, while highlighting the very need for research to make sense of the world. Collaborative research practices hold the potential to meet the challenges of this postmodern environment, while also opening new doorways to fulfill fundamental objectives of research problem solving – to better advance and seek new knowledge, to understand and make meaning in the world in which one lives (Fraleigh and Hanstein 1999). Janice LaPointe-Crump affirms such an inroad while recognizing unfounded fears associated with dance scholarship in a postmodern context: Broadening the base of dance studies does not necessarily result in negative postmod- ernist tendencies, namely fragmentation. Instead, a framework for illuminating the essential properties of dance, thereby deepening our understanding of it as a component of basic education, can emerge. (1990, 51) *Email: sherriebarr@gmail.com © 2014 Taylor & Francis Research in Dance Education, 2015 Vol. 16, No. 1, 51–66, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14647893.2014.971233