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 book invites the reader to think about collaborative research differently. Using the concepts of ‘letting go’ (the recognition that research is always in a state of becoming) and ‘poetics’ (using an approach that might interrupt and remake the conventions of research), it envisions collaborative research as a space where relationships are forged with the use of arts-based and multimodal ways of seeing, inquiring, and representing ideas.
The book’s chapters are interwoven with ‘Interludes’ which provide alternative forms to think with and another vantage point from which to regard phenomena, pose a question, and seek insights or openings for further inquiry, rather than answers. Altogether, the book celebrates collaboration in complex, exploratory, literary and artistic ways within university and community research.
Key messages Collaborative research is distinctive from but not necessarily superior to other research approaches. Arguments for collaborative research are sometimes overstated and this risks unproductive conflicts. Acknowledging the role of emotions in research is quite compatible with methodological pluralism. Introduction Research methods and methodology is a well-populated field in which proponents of an array of different approaches vie for the attention of researchers. There are various familiar narratives by which this is done. The case for
29 TWO Understanding impact and its enabling conditions: learning from people engaged in collaborative research Alex Haynes Introduction This chapter speaks to several of the key questions outlined in this book, such as what are the lessons and challenges of collaborative research? What do we mean by impact? What does it look like on the ground? Can what we learn from people’s experience of being involved in collaborative social research, the ways they describe impact, and what they value about their involvement and the outcomes help us to articulate the
215 SECTION 2 Understanding collaborative research practices: a lexicon Kate Pahl and Keri Facer Collaborative interdisciplinary research processes, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, necessarily unsettle assumptions about expertise and about what counts as a valuable ‘research outcome’. What we have found is that part of the challenge of evaluating these sorts of projects is the development of a language to talk about how project teams held open spaces for new possibilities to form and new ideas to emerge in ways that then could transmute and
199 Evidence & Policy • vol 12 • no 2 • 199–216 • © Policy Press 2016 • #EVPOL Print ISSN 1744 2648 • Online ISSN 1744 2656 • http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/174426415X14399903490979 Collaborative research partnerships for knowledge mobilisation Hilary Edelstein, hledelstein@gmail.com Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, Netherlands This study examines elements of collaborative research partnerships (CRPs) between university researchers and organisations who engage in knowledge mobilisation activities in education. The study uses key informant
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Background Collaborative research partnerships have the potential to increase the relevance, usability, and impact of applied research. Indeed, many health research funding agencies now actively encourage researchers and knowledge users to collaboratively design and implement projects through focused funding opportunities ( Sibbald et al, 2014 ), and have called for organisational programmes and policies that facilitate such collaborative approaches (for example, Perry et al, 2003 ). Knowledge user engagement in the research process can increase the
REPLY Protean possibilities: attending to affect in collaborative research – a reply to Valdimar Halldórsson Elizabeth Campbell Curriculum and Instruction, Marshall University, Huntington, WV, USA This is a reply to: Halldórsson, Valdimar J. 2017. “Affective collaboration in the West Fjords of Iceland.” Global Discourse 7(4): 548–564. https://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2017.1355096 For reasons both epistemological and ontological, Valdimar Halldórsson grounds his call for participatory, affect-based research in his own experiences as an ethno- grapher, applied
In a recent article in this journal (‘Collaborative research and the emotions of overstatement’), Graham Crow argued that arguments for collaborative research were often overstated and sought to warn those who would adopt this position by offering ‘four cautionary tales’. These focused on (i) paying insufficient attention to history, (ii) conflating ‘different’ with ‘better’, (iii) over-simplifying social complexity, and (iv) courting conflict. The tales were themselves loosely tied to an emotional construct concerning hope and disappointment, pride and shame
