Abstract
Emerging scholarship on university–community co-production rightly emphasizes the importance of preparatory work to build research partnerships. Such preparation creates the necessary common ground on which to build a meaningful collaborative relationship. Drawing on our experiences on a large university–community co-production experiment in historical mapping, we argue that this work is particularly important in partnerships where relationships are characterized by difference. If academics wish to work with individuals and groups beyond the bounds of those with whom they already agree, ‘foregrounding’ co-production is a critical component. We identify three dimensions of foregrounding co-production: practical, epistemological and affective. Each become increasingly important in cases where communities lack trust in, or actively mistrust, the university. Understanding and navigating difference, historical harm and power asymmetries can be time-intensive, and it may require a reorientation of the relationship between process and output in collaborative projects such that initially intended aims are not met. In order to encourage co-production across difference, we conclude that foregrounding should be valued as an end or ‘output’ in and of itself.
Highlights
The ‘participatory turn’Over the last decade, participation, collaboration and co-production have gained increasing traction as valued components of academic research, especially in the social sciences, and in the arts and humanities
With the growing emphasis on community co-production, researchers have embarked on a range of innovative, experiential and participatory projects deploying novel forms of analysis and knowledge production, including performance (Pratt and Johnston, 2013) forum theatre (Cross and Brookes, 2015) and community mapping (Amsden and VanWynsberghe, 2005; Perkins, 2007), and have created an array of nontraditional outputs, from crowdsourced digital archives to a plethora of community toolkits
The lead on the project drew on the support of deaf academic colleagues who lived outside Bristol – and were less affected by the immediate local context – to formulate an engagement that, even if it did not generate material for the Know Your Bristol on the Move (KYBM) web resource, would highlight and explore very pertinent questions of knowledge, capacity, agency and power
Summary
Participation, collaboration and co-production have gained increasing traction as valued components of academic research, especially in the social sciences, and (to a lesser extent) in the arts and humanities. Between 2012 and 2013, as part of the Know Your Bristol project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Bristol City Council and the University of Bristol worked with local groups to create and upload material, including photographs and oral histories, to KYP This involved bringing people together at a series of events to share stories about their neighbourhood, home movies, family photographs and historical artefacts. It was at this point that the strand lead began to wrestle with the challenge of how to even begin to raise any significant interest in the project in the eyes of a community who were utterly preoccupied with other concerns To address these issues, the lead on the project drew on the support of deaf academic colleagues who lived outside Bristol – and were less affected by the immediate local context – to formulate an engagement that, even if it did not generate material for the KYBM web resource, would highlight and explore very pertinent questions of knowledge, capacity, agency and power.
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