Since March 2023, we’ve been hosting salons as part of the Collaborative Cultures project—informal gatherings where people come together to reflect on, discuss, and celebrate collaborative practice. We’ve now run eight salons, each exploring different dimensions of what it means to work together.
The salon format draws on centuries-old traditions of conversational gatherings for exchanging ideas. We chose this approach deliberately. Our earlier research with collaborative practitioners revealed that collaboration in institutions is often invisible and unrecognised. We assume it’s happening, but rarely create space to talk about it explicitly or acknowledge the interpersonal relationships and personal values that make collaboration work.
The salons are experiments in community connection and building—they’re emerging and experimental by design. We created the salons as a way to shift culture and cultivate community around collaborative practice in our context. The principles guiding the salons reflect this: we want the time and space to nourish participants rather than draw from them. We approach these gatherings recognising that we’re all experts in our own practice and learners too, coming together in the spirit of learning from and with peers. We’re challenging typical conventions of professional gatherings—these aren’t training sessions, showcases, workshops, or networking events. They’re something else.
Running roughly three times a year, each salon brings together people who share an interest in collaborative practice, from diverse professional and creative contexts. We’ve explored themes like Authority, Hope, and Crisis, and most recently, Hospitality and Care. Each salon has a different shape—we’ve included playback theatre, facilitated drawing, music, and creative activities—but they share a common structure: setting context, offering a rich experience or activity, and creating space for genuine conversation.
While this series has been hosted at the university in different spaces, the salons have quickly grown beyond their institutional origins. This salon format has become a key part of our repertoire, one we draw on for bespoke events and adapt to different contexts.
When was the last time you had dedicated time to think about not just what you’re collaborating on, but how you’re doing it? What would change if collaborative relationships were given the same attention as collaborative outputs? These gatherings remind us that collaboration is fundamentally human work, built on relationships, trust, and the often-invisible labour of maintaining connection and shared purpose.