Co-producing Research

A Community Development Approach

Banks, Sarah, Hart, Angie, Sarah Banks, Angie Hart, Kate Pahl, Paul Ward

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781447340751
• eBook ISBN: 9781447340782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

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.

Part I
Forming communities of inquiry and developing shared practices

TWO

Between research and community development: Negotiating a contested space for collaboration and creativity

Sarah Banks, Andrea Armstrong, Anne Bonner, Yvonne Hall, Patrick Harman, Luke Johnston, Clare Levi, Kath Smith and Ruth Taylor

Introduction

This chapter explores the interface between co-produced research and community development, drawing on work undertaken in North East England as part of the Imagine project. Discussion of the process and outcomes of Imagine North East provides fruitful material for contributing to perennial debates about whether certain forms of co-produced research (especially participatory action research) are, in fact, indistinguishable from community development. In this chapter we offer a brief overview of the work of Imagine North East before outlining the debates about the relationship between co-production and community development. We then examine three elements of Imagine North East: (1) an academic-led study of community development from the 1970s to the present; (2) a series of community development projects undertaken by local community-based organisations; and (3) a joint process of reflection and co-inquiry. We consider the role of co-produced research in challenging stigma, celebrating place and developing skills and community networks, and also the challenges of a co-inquiry approach.

Exploring community development from the outside and inside: The work of Imagine North East

Imagine North East was a partnership between 12 community-based organisations in Tyneside (including a local museum) and Durham University, officially running during 2014 and 2015, with dissemination and reflection work continuing in 2016. Community development featured in several ways. Not only did community-based sub-projects use processes of community development (mobilising people to work together) and generate community development outcomes (for example, strengthened communities, improved facilities) in their work for Imagine North East, but our study also had community development as its main focus. We adopted three approaches to the study of community development, as outlined below:

1. Studying community development from the outside: The starting point of the research was the community development projects of the 1970s in Benwell (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) and North Shields. These were part of Britain’s first anti-poverty programme, combining community development work and research with a view to diagnosing and alleviating poverty locally (Loney, 1983; Banks and Carpenter, 2017). We also looked at community development processes over time (from the 1970s to the present) as these areas were subject to numerous regeneration schemes in which local people were more or less engaged. This research was largely done by academic researchers and then shared in the wider group.

2. Doing community development projects and then reflecting on the learning from the inside: At the same time, each community partner organisation undertook a project linked to the theme of Imagine, exploring aspects of the past, present and future of the areas in which they were based. These projects were designed to fit into the everyday practice of the community organisations involved, engaging existing and new ‘service users’ and/or residents. Hence they were, in effect, community development projects, involving local people in undertaking oral history, filmmaking and other creative projects. In many cases, the activities undertaken were not necessarily regarded by the people participating in them as research projects or as part of a larger research project.

3. Co-inquiry, bringing the outside and inside together and creating new knowledge: The drawing together of all elements of Imagine North East happened in quarterly meetings of academic and community partners, and also in the preparation for and participation in local exhibitions and workshops and national Imagine events. The meetings were originally designed as ‘co-inquiry’ groups (Heron, 1996), with the aim of sharing experiences and reflecting on learning. In practice, these meetings often had as much of a focus on business items (for example, reviewing progress with projects, planning exhibitions) as they did on co-inquiry (reflecting together on learning). A smaller Writing and Reflection Group, convened after Imagine North East officially ended, effectively functioned as a co-inquiry group, and members of that group pulled together and developed material for this chapter.

Debates about co-produced research and community development

Research is often carried out in teams (especially in the natural sciences) and partnerships (for example, between companies, universities and government agencies). However, the term ‘co-produced’ tends to be used when the research team, partnership or group involves people who have a direct experience of, or interest in, the research topic (for example, young people, local residents) working as ‘co-researchers’ alongside academic or other ‘professional’ researchers (people who do research for a living). Hence co-produced research, as described in Chapter 1 of this book, is an umbrella term covering a variety of types of research, entailing diverse groups of people creating knowledge together.

This type of research is often undertaken as a way of bringing to the surface the existing experiential knowledge of people who may otherwise be marginalised or ignored, enabling them to create new knowledge and evidence that can contribute towards positive changes in their communities and in society. Described in this way, co-produced research almost inevitably entails both a process of community development (facilitating shared learning and engendering respect for diversity among a group of people with something in common) and community development outcomes (people feeling increased power and agency, development of new services/facilities). This helps explain why some critics question whether co-produced research is actually research at all – because it often looks and feels like community development.

What we call ‘co-produced research’ draws on a long tradition of participatory and action-oriented research, inspired by radical social movements concerned to democratise knowledge production (see, for example, Freire, 1972; Fals Borda, 1988; Smith, 1999) and counter what has come to be called ‘epistemic injustice’ (privileging powerful people’s knowledge; see Fricker, 2007). These approaches to research may be more or less radical in practice, but what unites them is a commitment to an ‘extended epistemology’ (valuing experiential as well as theoretical knowledge) and a ‘participatory worldview’ (valuing inter-connectedness) (Heron, 1996; Reason, 1998; Heron and Reason, 2000). This means that co-produced research as we understand it is essentially a value-based practice, drawing extensively on theoretical and methodological traditions of participatory action research (Kindon et al, 2007; McIntyre, 2007; Kemmis et al, 2014).

The link between participatory action research (PAR) and community development is long established, and there have been some debates about whether PAR is just a particular approach to community development. As Grant et al (2008, p 298) comment: ‘Some question whether PAR confuses community development with research.’ Indeed, according to Krimerman (2001, p 63):

… there appears to be no way for PAR practitioners to distinguish good scientific research carried out according to their precepts from good community or social change organising.

This argument may have some justification, as it is difficult to separate the ‘research’ element from the community development process and outcomes in a PAR project. PAR is traditionally seen as comprising a recursive (continuous) cyclical process of moving from reflection to research to action to reflection and back again. There is not necessarily a point when it can be said ‘this is research’ or ‘this is community development’; the processes are interwoven. Arguably what distinguishes PAR from community development is the intention of its practitioners. As Wadsworth (1998, p 7) comments: ‘PAR sets out to explicitly study something in order to change and improve it’ (emphasis added). This is how PAR differs from community development on its own:

• PAR is an approach to research that uses a community development process and leads to community development outcomes.

• Community development is a process of bringing people together in an egalitarian way to create social change. Sometimes it uses research, informally and formally, to provide evidence.

If a co-produced research project is a partnership between a research-focused organisation and a community development-focused organisation, each party may view what they are doing through different lenses. The research-focused organisation may regard their activities as research that takes a community development approach while the community organisation may regard their activities as community development with a research focus (see Banks, 2015). Some aspects of the organisation of Imagine North East tended to exacerbate these differences, as there were two substantive strands to the project: a university-led element studying community development practice from the 1970s to the present using fairly traditional methods (interviews, archival and statistical research), and a community organisation-led element that involved doing community development projects and reflecting on them. The third element, a co-inquiry group, was where the co-production was most explicitly built in. However, the creation of a ‘co-inquiry space’ – a space for co-production of new knowledge – was challenging to achieve, as the first two elements were happening in parallel, making attempts to interweave them quite difficult.

We now discuss each element of Imagine North East in turn, culminating with a discussion of co-inquiry and how this group of co-authors finally managed to reflect together on our learning and engage in collaborative reflexivity (critical reflection on how we, ourselves, worked as a group).

Element 1: Studying community development from the outside – Creating the context for Imagine North East

The starting point of Imagine North East was the community development projects (CDPs) that happened in Benwell and North Shields during 1973-78. These areas were selected as two of the 12 sites that comprised the Home Office’s experimental National Community Development Project in the 1970s, as they were relatively ‘deprived’, suffering the effects of de-industrialisation, reducing employment opportunities, poor housing and other services and facilities. In Imagine North East our aim was to re-examine the North East CDPs of the 1970s, considering what happened and what the lessons and legacies were, as well as tracing the subsequent history of regeneration and community development in these areas, which still remain relatively ‘deprived’ today. This part of Imagine North East was essentially the context, or backdrop, against which the community-based projects were designed to be conducted and interpreted. Or, from another perspective, the community-based projects were designed to add contemporary texture and grassroots voices to the historical and policy backdrop.

The findings of this part of the Imagine North East project are published elsewhere (see Robinson and Townsend, 2016a, b; Armstrong and Banks, 2017; Banks and Carpenter, 2017; Green, 2017). Here we summarise some of the key points relevant to the theme of this chapter, in particular, the action-research focus of the CDPs and some of the reflections of local residents, current and past activists, community workers and policy-makers on past and contemporary community development processes and outcomes. This short section essentially provides the background for the following two sections, as it outlines the context for the study and the bigger picture into which the community projects described in the next section were deigned to fit.

The CDPs were described as ‘action-research’ projects (Lees, 1975), employing community development workers and researchers, with the aim that community development work would generate issues for research that would then inform community development practice and policy recommendations. The use of the hyphen in ‘action-research’ was, apparently, fought for by the CDP workers ‘to demonstrate the linking of action and research in real time – not post-h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of images and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Series editors’ foreword
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• ONE: Co-producing research: A community development approach
• Part I: Forming communities of inquiry and developing shared practices
• Part II: Co-creating through and with the arts
• Part III: Co-designing outputs