Introduction

Week one of semester one. I ask the 80/90/100 students in the lecture hall, ‘Who has done group work before?’ Everyone raises a hand; but no one looks pleased. I go on: ‘Who likes to work collaboratively?’ No one raises a hand. And then: ‘Who thinks they’d work better in a team?’ No hands.

It can’t be helped. These students are enrolled in a required subject for final-year students in the Creative Writing, Film and Television Production, and New Media Production degrees, and they are about to begin a semester that is entirely committed to group work. Although they’ve shared subjects in theory or communicative practice, they have had – and seemed to want – very little contact with each other’s media, techniques or aesthetics. Some of them have even displayed a sort of disciplinary xenophobia: I’ve heard, for instance, that writers are navel-gazers who work in a worn-out form; that new media practitioners are elitists who have no idea of the capacity of narrative; and that film-makers have sold out to the commercial world. I don’t mean that the School is a hotbed of discontent. As individuals, the students get along as well as any other collection of students. But, as Nietzsche (1968) has pointed out, put any group of people together and you’ll get will-to-power. A group, especially when it is participating within what sociologists term a cultural field, is made up of agents motivated and informed by self-interest, and hence given to competition. Pierre Bourdieu (1991: 242) points this out, writing: ‘Every field is the site of a more or less openly declared struggle for the definition of the legitimate principles of division of the field.