Valuing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research
Beyond impact
Universities are increasingly taking an active role as research collaborators with citizens, public bodies, and community organisations but they, their funders and institutions struggle to articulate the value of this work. This book addresses the key challenges in collaborative research in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Universities are increasingly being asked to take an active role as research collaborators with citizens, public bodies, and community organisations, which, it is claimed, makes them more accountable, creates better research outcomes, and enhances the knowledge base. Yet many of these research collaborators, as well as their funders and institutions, have not yet developed the methods to ‘account for’ collaborative research, or to help collaborators in challenging their assumptions about the quality of this work.
This book, part of the Connected Communities series, highlights the benefits of universities collaborating with outside bodies on research and addresses the key challenge of articulating the value of collaborative research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Edited by two well respected academics, it includes voices and perspectives from researchers and practitioners in a wide range of disciplines.
Together, they explore tensions in the evaluation and assessment of research in general, and the debates generated by collaborative research between universities and communities to enable greater understanding of collaborative research, and to provide a much-needed account of key theorists in the field of interdisciplinary collaborative research.
Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol and Leadership Fellow for the AHRC Connected Communities Programme. She works on the relationship between formal education, informal learning and the development of public capacity to address social, technological and environmental change.
Kate Pahl is Professor of Literacies in Education, at The University of Sheffield. She worked on the Co-producing legacy project which explored how artists work within the AHRC Connected Communities programme and the AHRC/ESRC Connected Communities funded consortium ‘Imagine’, an interdisciplinary project concerned with ways in which communities and universities can co-produce knowledge together about the nature of civic engagement in contemporary societies.
Author/Editor details at time of book publication.
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