The co-productive imagination: a creative, speculative and eventful approach to co-producing research

Abstract

This article explores the co-production of research as creative, speculative, and eventful rather than as research processes determined by equality, empowerment and social justice. There are persuasive critiques of participatory and co-produced methods. In response, the case is made for focusing instead on the complex processes through which ideas, affects and relational capacities emerge, are nurtured or obscured, and circulate as part of the complex processes of co-producing research. The argument is developed with reference to a recent research project on youth loneliness. Through process philosophy and speculative approaches, the co-productive imagination illuminates the necessary imaginative work of conceiving propositions, techniques of relation and methodological tactics that move us through creative advance to eventful realisations that something in our research matters! Through an ethics of the event the aim of research becomes collaboratively creating new potentials in a world in process.

Fabricating future bodies: making digital sexualities research matter

“…Understood as a 'pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution of that body's capacity to act' (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. xvi), affect attuned me to the visceral shifts in speed, movement and sound when participants were in-relation with each other, the room, the research materials, myself and the other adults present as well as their 'corporeal expression' into 'bodily feelings' of happiness, sadness, worry and so on (Anderson 2006, p. 736). Rather than justifying co-produced research as enacting equality between participants and researchers, understanding research as occurring through dynamic affect-laden assemblages supports greater attentiveness to the micro-socialities that shapes the knowledge produced (Manning 2009;Duggan 2020). This paper examines how the hierarchical, power differentiated patterns of teaching and learning that strongly operate in schools constrained efforts to renegotiate pedagogical relationships through creative co-production (Evans, Rich and Holroyd 2004).…”

The cruel optimism of co-production

“…(2011, p. 28) Despite the discomforts and dissonances I experienced, regular meetings with the young people provided a rhythm to the research. Rather than approaching these interactions as discrete events (Duggan, 2020), I imagined them as steps towards a transformed set of relations.…”

“…By contrast, affective ethnography focuses on "moving bodies and events" (Stewart, 2017, p. 197) and so must be "both nimble and patient, jumping with the unexpected event but also waiting for something to throw together" (Stewart, 2017, p. 197). Affective ethnography thus demands an "eventful" conceptualization of co-production; resisting grand, unified forms of epistemic collaboration, with a focus on small, momentary forms of trans-individual experience: a look, a connection, a feeling (Duggan, 2020). Affective forms of ethnographic participation are subtle and tacit, and researchers and participants encounter them as emergent situations, not through a teleological methodology.…”

Negotiating cultural appropriation while re-imagining co-production via Afrofuturism

“…I understood research co-production as imaginative work in relation to an openness to the potentials of events (Duggan, 2020) -which, in this case, was profoundly interrupted by stuckness. I see co-production as the collaborative and imaginative work in conceiving propositions -techniques of relation, ideas and encounters (Manning and Massumi, 2014) then staging them and nurturing our imaginative capacities, 'to answer the cry "It Matters"' (Stengers, 2019, p. 15), as we achieve new thoughts and feelings in a world in process (Gaskill and Nocek, 2014).…”