Immersion in the Muddy Waters: A Collaboration between a Social Scientist and a Dance Choreographer

The purpose of the present manuscript is to reveal the often hidden and muddy components of trandisciplinary collaboration. We focus on collaboration between a dance choreographer and a social scientist working on a feminist project. At the time of this writing, we are in the process of re-analyzing social science qualitative data for an evening-length dance performance. As we reflect on our process of collaboration, we expose our pauses, confusion, questions, and emerging insights. We argue that sharing struggles of our collaboration as we encounter them is a provocative and fresh way to capture and illuminate critical questions in the growing enterprise of transdisciplinary research. We suspect that the way we structured our collaboration and our discoveries from this specific project have broader implications and promise to advance the on-going dialogue of the risk, danger, and exceptional reward possible in transdisciplinary research.