In conversation with...:co-designing with more-than-human communities

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The aim of this project is to explore how an expanded account of community - one which recognises the active participation of non-humans - might contribute to our understandings of how research can be co-designed and co-produced. It arises from a concern that 'community' has too often been thought of as only including the human, thus leaving out the wide range of interactions with non-humans that sustain and enhance our communities. Likewise, 'research' itself appears most often as an activity that is quintessentially human. However, our research practices have always been entangled with the lives, qualities and capacities of non-human actors. From the birds who demonstrated the vacuum in Robert Boyle's air pump, the dogs who demonstrated the effects of insulin and the genetically modified OncoMouse, much research has relied extensively on the contributions of non-humans. Our interest in this project, then, is to explore how both research and community might be rethought within a 'more-than-human' framework. Literature on the coproduction of research with communities emphasises the benefits of attempting to integrate a wide range of perspectives and experiences, arguing that this makes stronger research that is of more benefit to those the research affects. However, while there is some evidence that, in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss, proponents of participatory research have begun to recognise a need to extend the paradigm beyond the human communities it has focused on, this has not yet occurred. As a result, this project will initiate an exploration into the possibilities of co-designing research with more-than-human communities. We will do this through staging four 'conversations' with non-human actors and the humans who work with them. We are interested in exploring issues to do with power, voice and agency and so will seek to test the boundaries of 'polite conversation' by working with dogs, bees, trees and water. Reflections on these workshops will be available from our website and we will produce an analysis of the opportunities and challenges of such an approach. We will also produce a peer-reviewed article that will extend the literature on co-production and co-design in this new direction.