Co-Creation and bridging theory-method divides

Abstract

This chapter thinks through the possibilities and challenges posed by Co-Creation as a knowledge practice that is more than a ‘novel method’ for addressing urban inequality. We consider the onto-ethico-epistemological assumptions that underpin the ‘doing’ of co-creation as inventive practice. Drawing upon Barad (2007), Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and post-qualitative scholars (St Pierre, 2011), we ask what claims are made about participatory approaches in voicing issues of marginalisation? How are human and non-human relations recognised in creative collaborations? What role does affect play in the micropolitics of working with different desires, bodies, and techniques to effect change? New materialism offers a useful orientation to thinking through Co-Creation as a material-discursive process that has a rhizomatic, rather than linear form. Moving beyond humanist assumptions about individual creativity and essentialised identity categories, Co-Creation can be understood as a research assemblage that brings into relation objects, desires, bodies and contexts to disrupt, queer, reimagine and contest the normative (e.g. stigmatising of groups and places, and the invisibility of privileged perspectives). Using examples from our own and others’ work we explore the complex processes of Co-Creation projects, as they bring together artists, academics and communities in the face of urban inequality and marginalisation.