Abstract
The paper offers a critical intervention into the debates on research impact, theorising the potential of underpinning research agendas by ethics of care. We explore how a range of vectors of care, both intimate and distant, emerged in collaborative activities between researchers based in the UK and community youth workers and teenage female carers in Slovakia, leading to a series of (un)expected outcomes. We argue that while all research impacts cannot be planned in advance, an ethics of care embedded in relationships within and beyond research settings may form conditions in which outcomes exceeding the initial expectations can be anticipated. To achieve this, we argue for questioning the distinctions between academic and non-academic collaborators, legitimising diverse forms of knowledge, action and impact in institutional policies, and for conceiving research projects from the beginning as “more-than-research” avenues.
Highlights
We argue that while all research impacts cannot be planned in advance, an ethics of care embedded in relationships within and beyond research settings may form conditions in which outcomes exceeding the initial expectations can be anticipated
Advocating transgressions of neatly demarcated professional positions and roles, we suggest that commitment to collaboration beyond the academy and to an ethics of care has a strong potential to nurture unforeseen impacts and developments and long-term relationships and further capacities among academic, professional and residential communities
The vectors of care and other relational dynamics that evolved through engagements between young carers from Slovakia, their community, local practitioners, academics from the UK and others in turn initiated a variety of impacts, ranging from tangible developments in the neighbourhood through social relationships to academic production of knowledge
Summary
We interweave two settings of care: the experiences, practices and social relationships of young female carers from Slovakia in their neighbourhood; and the network of engagements between the girls, community youth workers and academics from abroad. In the context of the PV project, meeting our individual and collective agendas (in research, youth and community work) required involvement of the girls as much as they in turn drew on the support from adult professionals in their venture of improving conditions for the younger children in the neighbourhood for whom they cared.
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