Abstract
This paper adds to an increasing body of social science literature, which engages with the research practice of "co-production." It aims to make a distinctive contribution by suggesting that what is produced under this process should be given greater attention. Previous literature has focused on the "co" (cooperative) element: debating whether and under what conditions wider participation between academic and non-academic actors can be genuinely emancipatory, and the degree to which more radical research approaches centred on empowering marginalised groups have been usurped through management discourses of participatory governance. Drawing on a case study of a pilot project that developed support resources for new fathers under the auspices of a co-production research design, the paper highlights the dynamics and limitations of the process, but additionally and distinctively suggests an important way in which the success of co-production can be judged that includes practical and tangible outputs beyond academic knowledge and takes objects and materiality seriously as a dimension of co-production in an academic setting.
Highlights
CO‐PRODUCTION AS PARTICIPATION AND EMANCIPATIONParticipatory research, at heart, challenges the idea of academic expertise as necessarily superior to the perspectives of those who are the subject of study, and maintains that better knowledge can be generated when different sources of “knowhow” are combined
Our case is a collaborative project involving four academics from different disciplines and a range of public actors. We focus on this project because it was explicitly designed to produce tangible outputs – directed by the funder whose focus was on funding “co‐creation” projects between academic researchers and the public to “make” something to help people “live well.”
The co‐production of a web resource to help men “live well” as fathers constitutes an interesting example of interaction between academics and research users because it demonstrates that the engaged scholarship that is so heavily promoted is not always possible even when it seems plausible at the outset
Summary
CO‐PRODUCTION AS PARTICIPATION AND EMANCIPATIONParticipatory research, at heart, challenges the idea of academic expertise as necessarily superior to the perspectives of those who are the subject of study, and maintains that better knowledge can be generated when different sources of “knowhow” are combined. The initial analysis and editing of these conversations would be conducted by the academics (primarily Jonathan Ives), who would present this back to the group of fathers where it would form the basis of further discussion about how the film clips could be revised, developed, and used for an online resource, and what additional materials might be required.
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