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

这个项目的目的是探索如何扩大对社区的解释——一个承认非人类积极参与的解释——可能有助于我们理解如何共同设计和共同生产研究。它源于一种担忧，即“社区”常常被认为只包括人类，从而忽略了维持和增强我们社区的与非人类的广泛互动。同样，“研究”本身也常常表现为一种典型的人类活动。然而，我们的研究实践总是与非人类行动者的生活、品质和能力纠缠在一起。从展示罗伯特·博伊尔（Robert Boyle）的空气泵中的真空的鸟类，到展示胰岛素和转基因OncoMouse的效果的狗，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在于探索如何在“超越人类”的框架内重新思考研究和社区。关于与社区合作研究的文献强调了尝试整合广泛的观点和经验的好处，认为这会使研究更有力，对受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，参与式研究的支持者已经开始认识到有必要将这种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进行四次“对话”来实现这一点。我们对探索与权力、声音和代理有关的问题很感兴趣，因此将通过与狗、蜜蜂、树木和水的合作来尝试“礼貌对话”的界限。对这些讲习班的反思将在我们的网站上提供，我们将对这种方法的机遇和挑战进行分析。我们还将发表一篇同行评议的文章，在这个新方向上扩展关于合作生产和共同设计的文献。

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.