Search Results
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.
This is a book that challenges contemporary images of ‘place’. Too often we are told about ‘deprived neighbourhoods’ but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this unique book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham.
Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography and collaborative ethnography, this book literally and figuratively re-imagines a place. It is a manifesto for alternative visions of community, located in histories and cultural reference points that often remain unheard within the mainstream media. As such, the book presents a ‘how to’ for researchers interested in community collaborative research and accessing alternative ways of knowing and voices in marginalised communities.
Offering a critical examination of the nature of co-produced research, this important new book draws on materials and case studies from the ESRC funded project ‘Imagine – connecting communities through research’. Outlining a community development approach to co-production, which privileges community agency, the editors link with wider debates about the role of universities within communities. With policy makers in mind, contributors discuss in clear and accessible language what co-production between community groups and academics can achieve. The book will be valuable for practitioners within community contexts, and researchers interested in working with communities, activists, and artists.
This chapter explores the role of theory in the work of collaborative research. To try to explain how theory comes into the lives of our projects, we tell personal stories about moments of realization where the reading of theory directly connected to how we understand the world of our projects. In the middle of the process of making and doing within the thick of it, new concepts of research and knowing emerged.
This chapter considers how arts and humanities approaches can offer a different lens which expands possibilities in terms of ways of knowing and ways of communicating. This process can then make space for different voices to come to the fore and can raise issues of power, meaning and ambiguity. The chapter considers the potential of co-production as a methodology to do this. In community contexts it might mean shifting attention away from preferred ways of knowing and being to unfamiliar ways of knowing and being for all involved. The chapter suggests that there is the potential for spatially situated methodologies to surface different kinds of knowledge. The chapter suggests that society needs to build new ways of knowing together. The chapter provides for example an experience of co-producing a film with the youth service and a group of young people in Rotherham for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).
This chapter aims to sketch out Rotherham as a remembered place, where people hold knowledge and experiences. Rotherham is also a place in the future. The chapter explores ways in which communities can be represented differently in an age of uncertainty and austerity. It focuses on creativity and the arts as a source of hope and a way of imagining better communities. This draws on the central purpose of the ‘Imagine’ project. As part of the ‘Imagine’ project, this chapter reveals a series of interlinked projects within Rotherham, exploring common everyday cultures, writing in the community, artistic images of Rotherham, and oral histories of Rotherham.
This chapter outlines the structure and processes of the book. It discusses how there is an increasing emphasis on collaboration fuelled by communities seeking evidence and validation and increasingly fluid careers and identities of academics and practitioners, among other things. Despite collaborative research flourishing, theories and methods needed to understand and make judgements on their worth does not always keep pace. This chapter outlines the need for this type of research and how to understand the legacy of these collaborations.
This book articulates what it is to do collaborative interdisciplinary research drawing on projects from the UK based Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Connected Communities programme. This book tells stories of the value of collaborative research between universities and communities. It offers a set of resources for people who are interested in doing interdisciplinary research across universities and communities. It provides a lexicon of key ideas that researchers might find useful when approaching this kind of work. The book aims to enhance ways of doing collaborative research in order to improve the ways in which that kind of research is practiced and understood. Nine chapters, based on particular projects, articulate this value in different ways drawing on different research paradigms. Chapters include discussions of tangible and intangible value, an articulation of performing and animation as forms of knowing, explorations of such initiatives as community evaluation, a project on the role of artists in collaborative projects and ways in which tools such as community evaluation, mapping and co-inquiry can aid communities and universities to work together. Chapters also focus on the translation of such research across borders and the legacy of such research within universities and communities. The book ends by mapping the future directions of such research.
This book articulates what it is to do collaborative interdisciplinary research drawing on projects from the UK based Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Connected Communities programme. This book tells stories of the value of collaborative research between universities and communities. It offers a set of resources for people who are interested in doing interdisciplinary research across universities and communities. It provides a lexicon of key ideas that researchers might find useful when approaching this kind of work. The book aims to enhance ways of doing collaborative research in order to improve the ways in which that kind of research is practiced and understood. Nine chapters, based on particular projects, articulate this value in different ways drawing on different research paradigms. Chapters include discussions of tangible and intangible value, an articulation of performing and animation as forms of knowing, explorations of such initiatives as community evaluation, a project on the role of artists in collaborative projects and ways in which tools such as community evaluation, mapping and co-inquiry can aid communities and universities to work together. Chapters also focus on the translation of such research across borders and the legacy of such research within universities and communities. The book ends by mapping the future directions of such research.
This book articulates what it is to do collaborative interdisciplinary research drawing on projects from the UK based Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Connected Communities programme. This book tells stories of the value of collaborative research between universities and communities. It offers a set of resources for people who are interested in doing interdisciplinary research across universities and communities. It provides a lexicon of key ideas that researchers might find useful when approaching this kind of work. The book aims to enhance ways of doing collaborative research in order to improve the ways in which that kind of research is practiced and understood. Nine chapters, based on particular projects, articulate this value in different ways drawing on different research paradigms. Chapters include discussions of tangible and intangible value, an articulation of performing and animation as forms of knowing, explorations of such initiatives as community evaluation, a project on the role of artists in collaborative projects and ways in which tools such as community evaluation, mapping and co-inquiry can aid communities and universities to work together. Chapters also focus on the translation of such research across borders and the legacy of such research within universities and communities. The book ends by mapping the future directions of such research.
