Abstract
Co-production has become the new buzz word in academia and projects of citizen empowerment, where communities are positioned as active agents who are involved in the co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-evaluation of both services and social research. Within this trend, there has been an ideological commitment to new forms of participatory democracy, giving voice and the equalising of hierarchical relationships. However, in practice, co-production has a range of challenges and obstacles related to power, resources, ethics and relationships, which need to be effectively negotiated (see Byrne et al., 2016; Staples et al., 2019). For this reason, this book is very much welcomed as it deals with the ‘doing’ of co-production across a range of sites and organisations, importantly drawing on the first-hand accounts of academics, community workers, practitioners, policy advisors, and artists.
The edited collection features ten chapters as well as an Introduction and Conclusion. The introduction usefully sets out the philosophical underpinnings of co-production and its development over time and across policy, arts, community, and university settings. The concluding section, which I am very pleased to see as many edited collections neglect to provide any form of summary, compares trajectories across the devolved nations of the UK and considers the future of co-production. In this short review, I will not be able to draw on each chapter so will focus on two of my favourite contributions.
Kayte McSweeney and Jay Stewart, offer the reader ‘Hacking into the science museum: young trans people disrupt the power balance of gender ‘norms’ on the museum’s ‘who am I?’ gallery’. Museum curation has been critiqued for producing value laden knowledge, while at the same time maintaining an impression of objectivity and neutrality. Such critiques have led to calls for a democratisation of knowledge where there is an opportunity to make clearer connections between the objects displayed and the meaning making of those who have designed and used the curated material culture.
McSweeney and Stewart responded to this call in their work with young people to question the representation of gender within London’s Science Museum. In a process they describe as ‘hacking’, young people challenged and troubled the understanding of gender at the museum by displaying their own objects that they had sourced, with accompanying audios explaining the meaning that they ascribed to these types of visual culture. These forms of display both subvert the official narrative of the institution and enable objects to be understood from the perspectives of those outside of the institution, reconfiguring what counts as knowledge, through co-production. This chapter has been an inspiration in my work with National Museum Wales and their Hands on Heritage project, which is taking a similar approach, and importantly it explores how to move beyond temporary displays on the sidelines to achieving a legitimate legacy.
In ‘The regulatory aesthetics of co-production’, Penny Evans and Angela Piccini consider the tensions between the positioning of science as rigour and rationalism, and arts inquiry as aesthetics and emotion. In practice, this distinction is more difficult to maintain (see Loughran and Mannay, 2018); however, it is one tension within arts based forms of co-produced research. I particularly enjoyed this chapter as it carefully explores everyday challenges, including the regulatory frameworks of funding and grant capture, the entangled relation of commonality and difference, the regulatory aesthetics of communities, Key Performance Indicators, and the administrative systems that both enable and constrain projects of co-production. Within these systems and relationships, and with the weight of expectation as a further regulatory force, the reader may begin to wonder why co-production is entered into and how it is achieved. Evans and Piccini have found ways to work through these regulatory aspects; but their chapter effectively communicates the inherent rigidities, necessary negotiations, and adaptability required to advance community engagement and projects of social justice.
The other chapters, exploring the impact agenda, community radio, indigenous maps and audio artefacts, all bring different elements to discussions of co-production. The style of different authors varies considerably, which may not be appealing for a reader who seeks some form of consistent styling; but I feel this is an expected, and necessary, artefact of the topic and its diverse partners, collaborators and co-producers. If I wanted to be really picky, the References all appear in one chunk at the end, and the Index is not highly detailed. However, the overall content is essential reading for anyone considering or already involved in co-production; and more widely it has much to say about why and how we undertake qualitative research, who benefits, and where researchers, participants and collaborators are positioned within and outside of the fieldwork process. Additionally for an academic publication – the book is relatively inexpensive.
