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

这个项目的目的是探索扩大对社区的描述-承认非人类的积极参与-可能有助于我们理解如何共同设计和共同产生研究。它源于一种担忧，即人们太过频繁地认为‘社区’只包括人类，从而忽略了与非人类的广泛互动，这些互动维持和加强了我们的社区。同样，“研究”本身最常被看做是一种典型的人类活动。然而，我们的研究实践一直与非人类行为者的生命、素质和能力纠缠在一起。从展示罗伯特·博伊尔气泵真空的鸟类，到展示胰岛素效应的狗，以及转基因的肿瘤鼠，许多研究都广泛依赖于非人类的贡献。因此，我们对这个项目的兴趣是探索如何在“比人类更重要”的框架内对研究和社区进行重新思考。关于与社区共同进行研究的文献强调了尝试整合广泛的视角和经验的好处，认为这会使研究更有力，对研究影响的人更有好处。然而，尽管有一些证据表明，在气候变化和生物多样性丧失的背景下，参与性研究的支持者已经开始认识到有必要将该范式扩展到它所关注的人类社区之外，但这还没有发生。因此，这个项目将开始探索与人类以外的社区共同设计研究的可能性。我们将通过与非人类演员和与他们一起工作的人类进行四次‘对话’来做到这一点。我们对探索与权力、声音和机构有关的问题很感兴趣，因此将通过与狗、蜜蜂、树和水合作来测试“礼貌对话”的界限。我们的网站将提供对这些讲习班的思考，我们将对这种做法的机会和挑战进行分析。我们还将发表一篇同行评议的文章，在这个新的方向上扩展关于联合制作和联合设计的文献。

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.