Ways of knowing: Exploring the different registers, values and subjectivities of collaborative research

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Since 2010 the AHRC Connected Communities programme has supported a range of co-designed, collaborative and participatory research projects involving academics working with community partners. Events convened through these projects, together with the Connected Communities Summits in 2011 and 2012, have made visible the crucial question of what kinds of knowledge or 'knowing' are generated through this kind of collaborative research. For the purposes of this project we conceptualize this in terms of the different registers of knowing which come from, and are useful in, different places (to certain academic disciplines, for specific organisations, for practice or 'know how'); the different value of the 'research' and the sometimes distinct ways in which worth or usefulness is assessed by different stakeholders; and the different modes of subjectivity which point to the way collaborative research demands a 'shuttling between', arguably a productive 'unknowing' (Vasudevan 2011) and a reconfiguring of cognitive, affective and embodied ways of understanding.In this Follow-Up project, we will draw on the 14 Connected Communities funded projects which are represented by the project team's 11 core members. The 14 projects reflect the diversity and breadth of arts and humanities and social science disciplines funded through the programme (Community and Youth Work, Public Policy, Fine Art and Creative Arts, Design, Education Studies, Feminist Theory; Literary Theory; Museum and Heritage Studies; Philosophy). The 14 projects also represent different sites of collaborative knowledge production (youth work; museums and heritage sites; community/public health contexts; local government). More particularly, the projects represent distinct methods used for collaborative research and, therefore, distinct approaches to knowledge and knowing. This Follow-Up project will offer an innovative methodology for addressing the epistemic questions raised by collaborative research, methods, outcomes and impacts precisely by self-consciously deploying the different methods we have ourselves deployed within our previous collaborative research practice. We will investigate the relationship between methods and the registers, values and subjectivities of 'knowing' generated through collaborative research through the reflexive deployment of polyvocal methods of storytelling, non-linguistic visualisation and the more cognitive, rational and consensus building approach of a Socratic Dialogue. Our overall aims are to inform the Connected Communities programme through articulating the epistemic value of research designed and conducted with communities and to support the development of creative and reflexive practice in collaborative research.We will achieve our aims and objectives through a range of outputs: a website representing and dramatizing the approaches of the project as it happens, an accessible PDF which will give an overview of the project, a website with focused pathways through the resources generated throughout the project, 1 peer-review journal article (likely venue Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship) and an international workshop which will generate a cross-disciplinary network of academic and non-academic practitioners in this area and stimulate future international Connected Communities projects.