Re-imagining contested communities: connecting Rotherham through research

Abstract

Re-imagining contested communities carves out a communal space in which different kinds of knowers, generating diverse forms of knowledge, explore and share their insights into the community of Rotherham. The publication is presented as a layered response to a dominant framing of this community that is produced from a single, narrow perspective, and misrepresents or renders invisible many of its citizens and their experiences. In her now acclaimed 2009 TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, explicating the relationship between power and storytelling, remarks: ‘power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person’ (n.p.). Adichie highlights the importance of bringing balance to the landscape of narratives and perspectives about people and place, in particular those that are oppressed. Through the work of the text’s contributors, Re-imagining contested communities undertakes this challenge by unsettling, complicating and contesting the ‘official’ narrative history of Rotherham, with collaborative ethnography their primary approach, enacted through a variety of methods. The collection of essays not only contributes counter-narratives to dominant representations of this community but perhaps more importantly, through the selection of contributors together with the methodological frame underpinning the text, these essays combine to challenge traditional hierarchies of knowledge production, methods of knowledge production and even the nature of knowledge. In this way, this work has relevance and resonance far beyond the boundaries of Rotherham. The text combines knowledge produced through research modes practiced within academia, alongside knowledge produced in the community; knowledge expressed through writing in a scholarly register, alongside knowledge expressed through artistic modes of inquiry, communicating more nuanced insights developed through lived experience.