I began my doctoral research just over a year ago, exploring the co-production of research. 

But my journey through the subject matter began before that. Latterly, I worked with several organisations in evaluation and learning roles, where their work either centred or included involvement, participation, and co-production. In particular, my research builds on learning over the course of a collaborative evaluation of a youth advisory group for care experience, culminating in a co-produced film. Across my work with co-production, I observed the same themes arising, despite the layers of context shaping each example; same yet different. 

Same yet different. There were issues of time and temporal rhythms; language; inclusion linked to flexibility; transparency and trust; sustainable support; power and (in)action. Along with the sameness, I observed learning and reporting being confined to project-shaped buckets, leaving the transfer of learning systemically and vulnerably reliant on individual mobility. In the context of a participatory turn harnessing the expansion of these practices, I began to see the potential for wider, cross-project sharing and criticality. 

My research flows from three factors. Firstly, co-production as a concept is unbounded and unsettled, subject to multiple meanings and definitions and with uncertain relations to connected terms. Relatedly, there are both academic and practice concerns over justifying the time, space and resource for co-production, along with a capacity for evaluation that seems somewhat out of balance with the robust claim-making in its favour. Thirdly, co-production disrupts traditional knowledge relations and frequently aspires to social change, therefore power and politics are inescapably centred. Any discussion about the value of co-production cannot resolve these power relations but needs to account for them. 

What is co-produced research? 

There is a current taste for research co-production across disciplines, sectors, populations of interest and geographies, as well as co-production applied to policy and services. Research co-production is collaborative and relational, bringing otherwise-separate knowledge communities into dialogue and shared decision-making. As a concept, co-production operates contextually; it is multi-faceted and belies a single definition. Some of the claims made in its favour speak to improving research within current knowledge systems, while others signal bolder, transformational change. Taking inspiration from Bell and Pahl’s thinking (2017), co-production tacks between here and utopian ambitions, our current knowledge landscape, and a place of fragility and imagination. 

The term co-production can be used to denote specific theoretical traditions. However, it is often used expansively as shorthand for research done with (rather than to) one kind of community or another (although here too, there are exceptions in strands that encompass partnerships between researchers and organisations/industry, rather than public contributors). By casting the net so wide, such meanings may elide the distinct histories and philosophies underpinning varied traditions of participatory research, public and cultural participation that come to be expressed in the space. Perceiving space for co-production as one that is shared and liminal sheds a light on its fragility and diversity. In addition to those questions about where meaning comes from, there are also questions about symbolic use of language; not just what research co-production means to different people, but what they mean by it.