The co-productive imagination: a creative, speculative and eventful approach to co-producing research

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the co-production of research as creative, speculative, and eventful rather than as research processes determined by equality, empowerment and social justice. There are persuasive critiques of participatory and co-produced methods. In response, the case is made for focusing instead on the complex processes through which ideas, affects and relational capacities emerge, are nurtured or obscured, and circulate as part of the complex processes of co-producing research. The argument is developed with reference to a recent research project on youth loneliness. Through process philosophy and speculative approaches, the co-productive imagination illuminates the necessary imaginative work of conceiving propositions, techniques of relation and methodological tactics that move us through creative advance to eventful realisations that something in our research matters! Through an ethics of the event the aim of research becomes collaboratively creating new potentials in a world in process.