Understanding collaborative research practices: a lexicon

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 cross boundaries. This way of working is very different from linear models of research that have clear lines of causality and in which research ‘ideas’ are associated with particular individuals in the form of intellectual property. Instead, these ways of conducting research are enmeshed, entangled and complex, and are associated with divergent outcomes as well as sometimes-difficult experiences and contrasting clusters of ideas....

Culturally mapping legacies of collaborative heritage projects

In this chapter how cultural mapping can act as a means to understand the legacy of collaborative heritage research is explored.The difficulties inherent in capturing this story, including resolving the tensions between organising structures and the practices of chance and serendipity that shape the experiences of people in their heritage work. This gets to the heart of what happens to knowledge and our understanding of practices when we try to capture, share and translate specificities from our research collaboratively. The authors suggest how the visual and discursive aspects of cultural mapping can offer a means to accommodate such tensions. Using data from community groups and focusing on the collaborative role of a community partner in designing and evaluating this research, the mapping toolkit as a legacy output is introduced. Some of the actual stories from the heritage groups are traced and show how they draw attention to legacies of conducting community based heritage projects. The underpinning research involved in producing this legacy output highlights the attention that needs to be paid to multiple voices, narratives and types of impact that are important in people’s lives.

Evaluating legacy: the who, what, why, when and where of evaluation for community research

Evaluation is often anathema the co-produced research and community groups. For the latter, onerous evaluation requirements from funders can be the bane of their lives. In terms of co-produced research, that evaluation often positions an expert in authority to judge whether an activity has been a “success” is the opposite to the trusting relationship much co-produced research is trying to develop. This chapter suggests that evaluation, when done well, can and should be a more central practice in co-produced research. Importantly, it is suggested that by asking the difficult question of “what positive outcomes are we producing?” the evaluation of co-produced research can make it more ethical, and develop a learning approach among partners.

Translation across borders: connecting the academic and policy communities

This chapter looks at the legacy of three projects which connected research and policy communities, through the development of ‘policy briefs’ for the UK Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). These were short and accessible reviews of research relevant to policy on localism. Starting from an understanding of policy-making as meaning-making, and of translation as situated and purposeful action, ethnographic and action research were used to explore how academics and government analysts translate research into ideas useful for policy makers. It concludes that the legacy of researching for policy can be understood both in terms of ‘things left behind’ and their direct impact on policy, and also more broadly in terms of participants’ purposes being met, and influences on academic and civil service norms and subsequent practice. Co-production is central to leaving such a legacy, in particular to break down mutual misunderstanding across the policy/academia border. In contrast interdisciplinarity seems less important, though broadening the disciplinary base of research used by government is certainly valuable. Underpinning everything else, the development of relationships of trust through collaboration and mutual learning is paramount.

Performing the legacy of animative and iterative approaches to co-producing knowledge

This chapter advances a distinctive conceptual framework for defining legacy, seeing it as co-produced and co-performed in relational processes and dialogical encounters between scholars and community partners, facilitated by creative methodologies of knowledge co-production. Nicolini’s (2009) idea of ‘zooming in’ serves as a theoretical anchor to co-define legacy in a pluralistic way by using five distinct yet inter-related lenses that have informed our collaborative research (i.e. Theatre Studies, American Pragmatism, Critical Theory, Deleuzian Studies and Actor Network Theory). Legacy is thus defined as ‘the reproduction and transformation of a theatre tradition for new contexts such as research’, ‘changes inideas or practices (or both)’, ‘the empowerment of individuals and groups through the intersubjective development of understandings’,‘novelty and change through repetition’, and ‘the enrolment of new actants into a network’, respectively. This chapter illustrates how legacy was co-defined, co-performed and co-evaluated with various community partners and suggest how and why our conceptualisation of legacy may appeal beyond arts and humanities subjects.

Socialising heritage/socialising legacy

A key value offered by collaborative research is to recognise the powerful role relationships play in the development and legacy of knowledge. The project ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ put the social dynamics between the collaborative team – comprised of researchers, practitioners, funders and community activists – at the heart of the project’s methodology. Thinking of this research as social and relational also reflects an interest in thinking about heritage in the same way. Taking this approach is helpful because the concept of heritage is often bound up with big and abstract aims, to be ‘forever and for everyone’. These very scaled-up ambitions often lead politically towards the professional management of heritage ‘on behalf of’ a larger public. It is shown that for participation in heritage decision-making to be increased these larger ideas – ‘stewardship’, ‘scale’, ‘significance’ and ‘the future’ – need themselves to be socialised and, through this, made more amenable to participation. The same methodologies were diagnosed for increasing participation in heritage for our own, equally relational, approach to legacy: to act, connect, reflect and situate.

Introduction

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.

What is the role of artists in interdisciplinary collaborative projects with universities and communities?

In this project the legacies that artists left when they worked with universities on collaborative interdisciplinary projects are explored. This chapter discusses how artists influenced such projects and what kinds of contributions they made. An introduction to the histories of artists working in community projects is provided. Then the approaches to understanding what artists did on these projects is outlined. In order to find out about their practices, the authors drew on a number of methodologies, using experiential as well as empirical methods. It is concluded that artists deployed a number of different ways of knowing to create spaces for co-produced ideas to emerge in collaborative projects. Through a process of analysis it is found that while in some cases artists were devising activities based on ideas that had been constructed in the main by academics, in others, ideas and project directions were jointly constructed, sometimes leading to a new outcome or object. The conclusion to the study was that the effect of artists working in collaborative interdisciplinary projects can be profound and far-reaching for research and the knowledge it produces.

Weighing value: who decides what counts?

This chapter focuses on community-university research partnerships (CUPs). It offers suggestions about how their value might be evidenced and argues that developing a more reflective and effective evaluative culture within CUP is critical to realising their value and sustaining their future. The chapter explores how CUPs have a particular way of working and can create significant positive outcomes at individual, societal and organisational levels.

Future directions

In writing this book, we have had several audiences in mind. We have been writing for those participants in collaborative research who are looking for tools to ask hard questions of themselves about what they are doing as well as needing to narrate its legacy to funders, peers and partners. We have been writing for those institutional supporters of research who are seeking to understand what constitutes the value of this sort of activity, and how this might be judged both before and on completion of projects. We have been writing for that growing band of academics and consultants who are being asked to evaluate and make sense of these complex projects. And we have been writing for the students of collaborative research – in universities and communities – who are just getting started and for whom tools to reflect on the legacies they may wish to leave at the end of the process may be useful....