The Swampy Lowland: Using Hyperlinks to Navigate the Multiple Realities of Partnership

Abstract

Our‘swampy lowland’ is the complexity of ‘partnership’working within health and social care in the UK public sector. Our long-term multilayered research project ‘swampy ground’ uses a website to build and communicate many different layers of ‘truth’ within complex partnerships that aim to improve people’s lives, often people with little power. We use multi-voice research to gain ethical access to the perspectives of different actors in partnerships, often in sensitive situations where much is difficult to make public. Our work spans from 2000 to 2006 and presents multiple ‘truths’ and ways of seeing and analyzing, through the use of web pages and hypertext (http://www.swampyground.org), exploring what happens on the ground in the translation of policy into practice.