Abstract

This paper uses issues that have arisen in carrying out the first stage of a research project as a focus for an exploration of international collaboration in research. The project was designed to explore how academics make decisions regarding teaching and research and how they develop specific academic identities. The paper uses a framework of multi-national research arrayed along a trajectory of increasing academic risk, decreasing stability, increasing human factors with compounding interaction costs, and increasing time to research outputs to discuss the challenges of doing research across countries. It explores factors that enable and those that constrain progress in carrying out collaborative research. It argues that the reflexive deliberations of the participating researchers are critical to reducing time to outputs and managing the complexity of the interface.