” by Nina Boulus-Rødje, Pernille Bjørn and Ahmad Ghazawneh](https://ecscw.eusset.eu/2023/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/screenshot.256-1024x440.png)
Submit your paper and visit us in Trondheim for deep discussions about CSCW as a research field! This week’s gem is the paper “‘It’s About Business not Politics’: Software Development Between Palestinians and Israelis” by Nina Boulus-Rødje, Pernille Bjørn and Ahmad Ghazawneh, presented at ECSCW 2015 in Oslo, Norway.
The authors have studied a startup company where Israeli and Palestinian developers work side-by-side. The paper uses the concept of discontinuity to frame and analyse the challenges faced by the employees, and how they delt with arising conflicts. The strategies used are summarize as “cautious consideration of using politically neutral categories when referring to the offices and the collaborative situations, putting politics temporarily aside, shutting down political discussion, and, finally, insisting that politics are personal and therefore should not interfere with the business domain.” In retrospective, it is both sad to read that the studied startup does not exist anymore, but also nice to see that collaboration is possible despite challenging circumstances.
Not to forget: You can download all the papers in our ECSCW gems series for free. Head to our own EUSSET digital library!