Emergence, not Emergency: Lessons in Project Management for Research-creation with the Decameron Collective

This paper offers a case study of the Decameron Collective’s use of project management techniques. We reflect on the project management tools that successfully guided a nine-person, six-institution team through a twenty-day sprint to exhibit a major research creation project in Portugal in 2023. The nine project members, accustomed to emergent and flexible practices grounded in non-hierarchical feminist praxes, found that more structured workflows that are feminist and equitable were—and continue to be—required to deliver on promised research outputs. This work adds to the growing body of work on project management in the humanities and digital humanities by demonstrating how to use and adapt project management tools in contexts informed by feminist praxis of care and non-hierarchical structures. The Decameron Collective is a group of nine Canadian feminist artist/scholars who began meeting shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes Jolene Armstrong Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siobhan O’Flynn, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, and Monique Tschofen. Our inspiration was a work of literature, Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron (1348–1353), a collection of a hundred stories premised on the idea of ten people fleeing Bubonic Plague-torn Florence to a country estate where they pass the time by telling stories. We used Zoom to meet up weekly, with the intention of setting aside the time for creative work. As we told stories, wrote poems, and made various arts and crafts, we evolved a highly creative, supportive, and informal environment that stood outside of the demands of our careers and families. Through years of weekly meetups, we amassed a body of artworks and then decided to make them public. We adapted the works for digital spaces and installed them in two collaborative projects: a WebGL world called Decameron 2.0 (2022), and a VR environment, Memory Eternal |Вічная Пам'ять (2023), as well as a number of smaller side projects involving various combinations of members. Additionally, we have collaborated to produce a substantial body of scholarship in the form of conference presentations, workshops, academic papers, as well as Omeka sites documenting our work. The Decameron Collective is feminist; the Collective’s structure is voluntary and non-hierarchical; and contributions by different members fluctuate depending on availability, interest, and levels of expertise. The organizational culture is one of collaboration, information sharing, creative experimentation, and support. The challenge we faced: in an eight week window in the spring of 2023, our creative models grounded in emergence needed to accommodate the procedural demands of dissemination outputs that included an international exhibition, a conference paper about it, documentation and preservation of the exhibition, and two nine-authored academic articles—in other words, an emergency. As Lynne Siemens wrote about collaboration in the humanities, “more hands” means “more [i]deas,” yet as our deadlines loomed, we were finding it difficult to pivot from our longstanding free-flowing ideational practice to one that involved goal setting and meeting deadlines (Siemens, “More Hands”). Additionally, by 2023, we were all returned to in-person work, which increased demands on our time and fractured our attention. The collaborative, non-hierarchical structure and highly creative environment we had created over years posed distinctive challenges for project management, while at the same time the multimodal nature of these projects required the implementation of project management tools. When we began meeting, it had never occurred to us to develop a charter or work breakdown structure, two tools we now would recommend to help clarify intentions, capacities, and availability, but as a collective, we had always seemed implicitly agreed on our priorities: cultivate and protect the relationships above all else. This was sometimes challenging because we have different skills, disciplinary …