'How should decisions about heritage be made?': Co-designing a research project

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Decision-making about heritage is changing and changing with it are definitions of 'heritage'. New legislation in the form of the Localism Act (2011), which aims to give more decision-making powers to local communities, can be located within a wider participatory turn which is questioning professional expertise and institutional legitimacy and is having the effect of pushing the definitions, knowledge, valuing and management of 'heritage' into new areas. To set a responsive research agenda for heritage studies and policy this project will co-design (Phase 1) and co-produce (Phase 2) research through creating new connections between the knowledge and perspectives of people from a range of organizations, communities, groups and perspectives who are situated in different places within heritage decision-making. The project Research Team will work together in the Phase 1 co-design phase through a series of iterative cycles informed by the 'extended' or 'radical' epistemology (Schon 1995) associated with participatory and systemic action research approaches (e.g. Banks et al. 2012; Burns 2007). Ideas we have drawn on relate to valuing and creating space for different ways of knowing such as experiential; presentational; propositional and practical (Heron and Reason 1997), the different ways through which 'knowing' is produced through action, interaction, experience, conceptualization and reflection (after Kolb 1984; Burns 2007, p. 34) and the productivity of feeling confident in what you know (your own perspective and opinions) as well as the productivity of a sense of 'unknowing'(Vasudevan 2011).Our co-design process will happen through a six-step process. In Step 1 'Entry points: Initial Reflections and Conceptualizations' the team will work with the PI to individually delineate their own positions and perspectives. In Step 2 'Workshop 1: Scoping the issues' the team will meet up and use techniques of storytelling and diagramming to scope the issues which will inform the final research design. In Step 3 'New perspectives: Experiential "unknowns" and Reflection', there will be a shifting of perspectives through the innovative use of 'day a life swap' which will see team members spending a day with someone else in the team and, through this, draw on the embodied learning than comes from being in unfamiliar places and contexts. In Step 4 'Workshop 2: Making decisions about the research project' a final workshop will draw on the experiential and reflective learning of Steps 2 and 3 to underpin the co-designing of Phase 2 research and Step 5 'Write and Collaboratively Revise final plan for AHRC'. The final step, Step 6, will see the submission of the 'interim progress report'.The Phase 1 outcomes will be the new relationships formed between team members and the development of a broader network of critical friends for the project. The Phase 1 outputs will be the Phase 2 research design itself, an 'in process' blog and website and a 2 page PDF reflecting on and capturing the co-design process. Looking forward to Phase 2, the Phase 1 Research Team will become the management group and will oversee the research direction. Indicatively we anticipate that we may identify a small number of parallel lines of inquiry that will give us targeted insights into different issues and questions related to the project's guiding question. Drawing on a systemic approach, we might deliberately site these inquiries in different places and use them to illuminate otherwise disconnected aspects of heritage practice and decision-making. These lines of inquiry could be led by any member of the Phase 1 Research Team and certainly might well be led by members of the Research Team not based in HEIs, with support from the PI. The connections between the lines of inquiry might be drawn out in workshops which will increase the reach of engagement and bring together the Research Team and wider academic, professional and community networks.