On Gathering: Exploring Collective and Embodied Modes of Scholarly Communication and Publishing is a special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP), released in January 2025. The process of bringing it together has been unique, from the themes explored, to the shape of the works included, to the experience of gathering as creators. Editor Katina Rogers shares the story of how the project came together, how it challenges convention and why it matters.
Hi Katina, would you please introduce yourself?
I wear a lot of hats! I'm an independent scholar and writer, an educator, a consultant and small business owner. My focus in all these areas is on developing and implementing creative, sustainable, and equitable structures in education, especially humanities graduate education. I work with universities and non-profits on strategic planning, program evaluation, and grantwriting. I also work with individuals as an editor and career coach.
I started working for myself in 2021, while the COVID pandemic was still in full swing. I found that I was craving community, and looking for people whom I could think alongside to try and make sense of everything that was happening. I started a small reading and discussion group loosely focused on imagining different futures for higher education. That was the beginning of the Inkcap Collective, a vibrant community of peers that has ebbed and flowed organically over the years. The JEP special issue has its roots in the Inkcap Collective—both in terms of the people involved, and especially in terms of the ethos and focus.
Tell us about the project you've been working on.
This special issue is an exploration of the ephemeral—the stray thoughts, the side conversations, the discarded scraps and false starts that inform a published work of scholarship, usually invisibly. Just as mushrooms spring up from the rot of the forest floor and return nutrients to depleted soil, this issue suggests something new might emerge in scholarly communication from the decomposing remnants of what came before. Drawing on this metaphor of the ecological functions of fungi, the contributions collected here consider matters of interdependence, coalition building, and collective thriving in and beyond the university, even in less-than-pristine conditions.
The collection reflects the many ways we gather and the many ways our thoughts take shape. Form and structure are objects of inquiry in many contributions, with creative and critical examinations of what relational scholarship looks like through postcards, invitations, podcasts, and multivocal pieces. Many contributors used the space to engage in collaborative work that self-reflectively considers the possibilities of collaborative writing. Others reflect on design studios, on academic administration, on grantwriting, on queer bibliography—all in order to better understand how we might bring about more justice, joy, and sustainability in our scholarly lifeworlds.
How did it all come together?
When the Inkcap Collective would gather for discussions, we would often talk about how valuable it was to be in a space that did not have expectations around outcomes or productivity—we weren't beholden to any administrators or funders, and nobody needed to see any progress reports from us. That was incredibly liberating. At the same time, though, as the group matured, I started to sense a desire for something more lasting. People wanted to be able to share something of the work we were doing, and the ways we were doing it.
The opportunity to do that arose when Alyssa Arbuckle and Janneke Adema became co-editors of JEP. Alyssa had been a longtime participant in Inkcap discussions, and knew that there was interest in finding a way to share our work more broadly. She approached me about putting together a special issue, which I was delighted to do.
The idea to focus on gathering emerged organically from there. Even though almost all of the Inkcap Collective's work has been virtual, the importance of shared time and relationships has been foundational from the start. I had been thinking for a while about how to go about citing the influence of something that didn't have a scholarly footprint—not only Inkcap discussions, but the countless interactions we have that shape our thinking. I decided to craft a CFP asking people to reflect on the aspects of our lives and work that don't ordinarily make it into the scholarly record, and to imagine new possibilities for how we share our work with the world. I'm also obsessed with fungi, so the CFP drew on metaphors of mushrooms and mycelium to imagine the ways we might think differently about scholarship. I wasn't sure how this would be received, so I was delighted to receive an abundance of proposals as well as quite a few kind words about the CFP itself—which wasn't really a genre I had thought about critically until then.
One thing that I think is unusual about the special issue has to do with my liminal position relative to the academy. I'm fairly senior in my career, yet I have no academic affiliation. As an independent scholar, I'm not invested in the trappings of formal publication for its own sake; nobody's expecting a tenure file from me, ever. So I felt a great deal of freedom in pushing boundaries and encouraging contributing authors to do the same. This created an interesting challenge, in that JEP is still a formal, peer-reviewed journal, and there's value in maintaining the professionalism and credibility that that affords. It also created a not-insignificant amount of extra work for the JEP editors and the team at Michigan Publishing to contend with during the production process. I'm grateful to them all for giving us the freedom to explore and for sticking with us when things got a little messy. Even more, we ran into limitations with Janeway, the technical platform on which JEP is hosted; sometimes the creative ideas that authors had simply couldn't be executed for technical reasons. Even running into those hurdles is useful, though—at least now we know where they are, and can trace the landscape with a bit more precision.
Many times when I've been a contributor to edited volumes, I've admired the list of contributing authors without ever really connecting with them during the course of the project. That seems like a shame! If everyone is contributing to a book or themed journal issue, we're bound to have something in common, and connecting the dots could make the collaboration that much richer. With that in mind, something that was important to me was to create a sense of community among the authors. I wanted people to have a sense of one another's work, to feel themselves to be part of a group, and to have a sense of shared excitement about the issue as a whole.
To do this, I started by changing the peer review process. Rather than having each piece undergo two anonymous, external peer reviews, I created a hybrid system, with one anonymous review and one open peer review by another author (or author group, since many pieces were collaboratively written) in the issue. This way, everyone knew at least one other piece intimately. Next, as the issue came closer to its final stages, I began hosting monthly coffee chats where authors could talk about their work, both in terms of content and process. I invited all contributors to join the Inkcap Collective Slack workspace to have a place for ongoing conversation. Not everyone wants (or has the bandwidth) to be a part of these ongoing discussions and spaces, but some do, and I'm glad to be able to facilitate it. And finally, we also hosted a public roundtable to celebrate the issue's release. The roundtable was wonderful—it gave us all a chance to connect with each other and reflect on what the process had been like, while also sharing the project with a broader audience. I was so touched by how people presented their work; it was clear that even some behind-the-scenes elements, like drafting the CFP and modifying the peer review process, had been noticed and appreciated, and had changed the ways contributors thought about their own work.
As for what comes next, I really hope that unexpected collaborations emerge from all this. I would love to see contributors join forces to write a grant, or work together on a new piece of scholarship, or simply forge a friendship. I hope the issue sparks a sense of possibility in readers—a broadening of what scholarly work can look like, of where that work can find a home, and of the kinds of connections that can emerge from sharing work that feels risky, as some authors felt about their pieces in this issue. And for me, I hope that ideas for the next stages of the Inkcap Collective emerge from the work of On Gathering. Who knows, maybe it's time to build towards actually gathering in person—a retreat, a working group, a conference of some kind? I've been mindful so far to resist the temptation of overdetermining what happens in and through the Collective, which goes against my nature as a very planning-oriented person, but letting things unfold organically has been liberating and powerful.
Where can we find more from you and the project?
Thanks for asking! The special issue is available now. If folks are curious about the Inkcap Collective, they're very welcome to sign up for my occasional newsletter (like once a month tops—I promise it won't clog your inbox) at inkcapcollective.com. I'm on Bluesky as @katinalynn.bsky.social, on Mastodon as @[email protected], and I occasionally post pictures of mushrooms and books on Instagram as @ktnrgrs.
We love misfits around here. It’s part of why we wanted to highlight your work. Who are your favourite misfits?
Fungi are my favorite misfits! People often think of them as plants, but they're evolutionarily closer to animals, even humans. They have all kinds of interesting ecological functions, from decomposing dead organic matter to facilitating interspecies nutrient transfer. They're drab or beautiful, tiny or huge, medicinal or toxic—and vastly understudied, so there is still so much to learn about them. I find them so thought-provoking and inspiring that I actually have a manuscript in development called Unexpected Flourishing: Growth from Decay in the Mycelial University (punctum books, maybe 2026) that explores higher education through a lens of mycology.
Photo taken in Cumberland, BC by Jesse Bauer, shared via Unsplash.