Co-production for or against the university: student loneliness and the commodification of impact in COVID-19

Abstract

PurposeThis paper explores the dissonance between co-production and expectations of impact in a research project on student loneliness over the 2019/2020 academic year. Specific characteristics of the project – the subject matter, interpolation of a global respiratory pandemic, informal systems of care that arose among students and role of the university in providing the context and funding for the research – brought co-production into heightened tension with the instrumentalisation of project outputs.Design/methodology/approachThe project consisted of a series of workshops, research meetings and mixed-methods online journalling between 2019 and 2020. This paper is primarily a critical reflection on that research, based on observations by and conversations between the authors, together with discourse analysis of research data.FindingsThe authors argue that co-producing research with students on university contexts elevates existing tensions between co-production and institutional valuations of impact, that co-production with students who had experienced loneliness made necessary space for otherwise absent support and care, that the responsibility to advocate for evidence and co-researchers came into friction with how the university felt the research could be useful and that each of these converging considerations are interconnected symptoms of the ongoing marketisation of HE.Originality/valueThis paper provides a novel analysis of co-production, impact and higher education in the context of an original research project with specific challenges and constraints. It is a valuable contribution to methodological literatures on co-production, multidisciplinary research into student loneliness and reflexive work on the difficult uses of evidence in university contexts.

Rethinking and remaking “the social”: co-production, critical pedagogy, and mental health among university students in the USA

“…Collaborative, co-produced research guided by principles of reflexive and democratic learning is vital in challenging status quo theories about how the social environment influences health (Cooper & Jones, 2022). As shown in this paper, an approach that builds on the knowledge and experiences of student researchers (Tarlau, 2014), placing student experiences and insights at the center, has the potential to generate new research questions and avenues for inquiry (Goldstone & Zhang, 2022), as well as new knowledge and theoretical innovation (Kaukko et al, 2020).…”

“…In what follows, we outline our methodology by briefly reviewing the relevant literature on research co-production and critical pedagogy (Cooper & Jones, 2022;Underhill, 2021). We then present the research methods and describe the main results, which are organized around three iterations of data collection and analysis.…”

The harms of medicalisation: intersex, loneliness and abandonment

“…Concerns have been raised about the dangers of loneliness at a national level, with Britain declared ‘the loneliness capital of Europe’ ( Bingham, 2014 ) and the current moment defined as an unprecedented ‘Age of Loneliness’ (Monbiot, 2014; see also: Alberti, 2019 ; Cooper, 2020 ; Vincent, 2020 ). Whilst new societal-level loneliness ‘crises’ are announced periodically ( Cooper, 2020 ), loneliness discourses are too often individualised and pathologised, placing a responsibility to be more resilient on individuals and communities who are struggling ( Stenning and Hall, 2018 ; Duggan, 2020 ), with little attention given to a broader landscape of inequality and disenfranchisement ( Cooper and Jones, 2021 ).…”

Creating spaces of well-being in academia to mitigate academic burnout: a collaborative auto-ethnography

“…Authors investigated the response of leaders to a crisis (Dewar, 2020), leaders' perceived disregard of ethics of care and felt neglect (Ling, 2020; Kong and Belkin, 2022; Belkin and Kong, 2022; Liu et al. , 2021), the pandemic impacts on loneliness (Cooper and Jones, 2022), collegiality and compassion as learning and teaching practices changed (Konstantinou and Miller, 2022; Yang, 2021) and the negative outcomes of burnout (Wong et al. , 2021; Vullinghs et al.…”

“…The disruptive effects of the pandemic on the HE sector and related concerns for academics' well-being and has become a rich source of investigation. Authors investigated the response of leaders to a crisis (Dewar, 2020), leaders' perceived disregard of ethics of care and felt neglect (Ling, 2020;Kong and Belkin, 2022;Belkin and Kong, 2022;Liu et al, 2021), the pandemic impacts on loneliness (Cooper and Jones, 2022), collegiality and compassion as learning and teaching practices changed (Konstantinou and Miller, 2022;Yang, 2021) and the negative outcomes of burnout (Wong et al, 2021;Vullinghs et al, 2020;Miguel et al, 2021). During crises, employees look towards organisational leaders and expect care and responsiveness (Harvey and Haines, 2005), yet leaders often prioritise survival.…”