Co-producing CARE: Community Asset-based Research & Enterprise

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Millions engage in creative hobbies each year, activities that are undertaken voluntarily for pleasure and involve high levels of ingenuity, competence and creativity. The value of hobbies for any project exploring a method and a methodology for co-created community research is that they represent an important area of community assets and strengths. The skills, knowledge, expertise and capabilities, if recognized at all, are often dismissed and devalued even by those who practice them, but they might be developed and applied more widely through volunteering, training, community activism, small business or social enterprise. 'CARE' brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers: academics working on participatory practice and co-design, and a community co-researcher with long experience of collaborative work with community groups, to develop a methodology for co-produced community learning and skill-sharing through hobbycrafts that promotes self-reflection and reflexivity. It aims to develop a methodology that grows from the grass roots, from within communities. A focus on handicrafts and to a lesser extent collecting, the purest form of hobby activities according to the hobbies historian Steven Gelber, offers opportunities for an integrated participatory methodology that could be up-scaled and applied to other 'communities of interest', eg. sports clubs, business groups, ecological societies, performers, dance enthusiasts, gardeners (Wenger 2002). The making involved in hobby crafts has particular qualities. While small group settings foster dialogue, the experience of making, whether drawing, construction, knitting or sewing, brings something more and can enhance trust and focus concentration (Csikszentmihayli 1979). Making, moreover, is connected with narration. There is a long history of women talking while they make, exchanging confidences and telling their life histories in sewing groups and quilting bees; the artist Suzanne Lacy's socially purposeful project The Crystal Quilt (1987. Tate 2012) reveals this as it gives voice and visibility to older women. This project aims to co-create a methodology around making, narrating and sharing as a means of giving voice, and promoting self-reflection and reflexivity in ways that build on and develop community strengths, skills and creativity. Action research (Crouch & Pearce 2012), participatory practice (Ledwith & Springett 2010), visual methodologies (Rose 2007), digital storytelling (Lambert 2002), co-produced creative processes (Matarasso 1997), and making as a component of material culture and design ethnography (Miller 2008), provide a framework for thinking about the processes of making, talking, sharing and connecting that hobbycrafts involve. Film, aural recordings, digital tagging, visual storytelling, podcast, diaries, mapping and other visual and material methods will be used to promote reflexivity helping individuals to unpack the deeper meanings involved in hobby crafts. Having confidence in one's own abilities is a powerful position from which to take on new skills, and a belief in the value of intergenerational skill-sharing through applied learning (learning through doing) between community participants and the project team underpins the project's co-creational ethos.