Online Workshop: December 2023

Writing a volume with multiple co-authors per chapter presents various challenges. One practical challenge being that it is difficult for us all to meet as often as we would like to discuss the volume in person. Thankfully, we were all willing to overcome our online-meeting fatigue from COVID times and meet online for a third workshop to discuss the volume on at the end of the year.  

With large co-authored projects like ours regular communication is essential to overcome some of the intellectual challenges. It helps make sure that the core terminology and concepts we’re using are aligned (or if not, that we know why and how) and helps us to make sure that the chapters speak to one another without undue repetition across them. 

During the workshop we all presented our latest ideas for the individual chapters and received useful feedback from other members of the team. We have so much expertise spread across the team – we come from a range of disciplinary perspectives, we cover a large number of different languages, and of course, we are experts in different relevant topics and geographies. Everyone had something useful to contribute to the other chapters, be it a useful tip about an obscure manuscript, or an idea about how to frame a particular comparison. However challenging working with so many people can be, the combined expertise is essential to tackling such a large and complex topic as European parliamentary culture.  

We left confident that we were heading in the right direction and very much looking forward to discussing chapter drafts with the team at our next workshop, which is scheduled for May in Aberdeen.