Taking Yourselves Seriously

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This project aims to create useful knowledge from a research project called 'Co-producing Legacy' that looked at what artistic understandings and knowledge contributed to research within the Connected Communities programme. The original project found that ways of doing things from artistic practice could inform community oriented research. These ways of doing things include methodologies that were founded on tacit, experiential, visual and linguistic knowledges that are open to change and can be experimental. Artists can produce paintings, write poems and create sculptures; they can also challenge or question how people think about the world and approach everyday experience from a 'slant' perspective. Methodologies stemming from these approaches can enable the production of poetry, visual art and film as outputs as well as create a questioning space where failure, experimentation and different ways of knowing are brought to the fore. These could be described as 'methods' but not in a social scientific mode of enquiry. Artistic methodologies might be open -ended, non consensus seeking and involve tacit and materially situated forms of knowledge creation. We are going to trial these methodologies within three projects with a focus on social cohesion within communities, and explore how research methods generated from creative and artistic sources can support and enable community researchers to do their own research. We will be producing resources from our work with three projects drawing on the 'Co-producing Legacy' research project, but with a new focus on social cohesion. The project team will work collaboratively with a national community research organisation, ARVAC (the Association for Research in the Voluntary and Community Sector) together with social cohesion experts from Sheffield City Council and Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council to embed artistic methodologies into community research through a series of focused projects. The projects will take place in a school in central Rotherham, a community context (British Asian Women's groups) and an adventure playground in Pitsmoor in Sheffield, UK.The aim is to support sustainable and participatory research within communities that draws on artistic methodologies. The outcome will be a set of downloadable resources on the ARVAC website that can inform community researchers about the potential of this sort of research and ways of approaching such research, drawing on case studies and providing concrete examples of practice so that researchers can try out their own ideas.This resource will be disseminated through the national networks that ARVAC can supply together with experts within the field of social cohesion. Our aim is to create a resource that disseminates the power and value of artistically informed research within communities to new audiences and can enable community and voluntary groups concerned about social cohesion to conduct their own research and disseminate this within communities.