Where Have You Come From? Where Are You Going?

In a post originally from his blog (www.caseystrine.com), Dr Casey Strine discusses an on-going project which attempts to encourage cross-cultural dialogue about migration, through collaborative interpretation of the Book of Genesis and art making activities. Where Have You Come From? …

Being a Researcher in Residence

 

In this post Dr. Katherine Runswick-Cole from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Research Institute for Health and Social Change and Professor Dan Goodley from the University of Sheffield’s Education Department discuss their ‘researcher in residence’ approach to co-production. This post has been adapted from a presentation originally given at the University of Southampton about Katherine and Dan’s project ‘Big Society? Disabled People with Learning Disabilities and Civil Society’ (https://bigsocietydis.wordpress.com/about/)

Big Society? Disabled people with learning disabilities & civil society

Background

Big Society is the Coalition Government’s ‘big idea’. The Cabinet Office identified three core layers of the Big Society policy agenda:

• (i) Empowering communities: giving local councils and neighbourhoods more power to make decisions.
• (ii) Opening up public services: enabling charities, social enterprises, private companies and employee-owned co-operatives to compete to offer high quality services.
• (iii) Promoting social action: encouraging and enabling people from all walks of life to play a more active part in society.

This research is working with people with learning disabilities and their key partners from the civil society to consider their place in the current Big Society context.

What we want to find out

1. To what extent are people with learning disabilities joining in with civil (charities etc.) society today?
2. What affect are the budget cuts having on organisations working with people with learning disabilities?
3. How can people with learning disabilities contribute to the ‘Big Society’?
4. What happens in circles of support, real employment, self-advocacy?
5. What can be learned from them?
6. How are people with learning disabilities experiencing opportunities for (self) advocacy, employment and community support and participation in civil society?

Our Partners

Our research will draw on ideas from sociology, social policy, community psychology and disability to help us contextualise these questions. Our study will work with three civil research partners:

1. Circles of support in Lancashire
2. Real employment in Bristol
3. Self-advocacy in Yorkshire

In order to explore the three core layers of the Big Society and to see if (or how) they fit with the practices and ambitions or our research partners and people with learning disabilities.

Methodology – What we are doing?

• Interview key stakeholders including policy makers, lawyers and disabled people’s organisations to access their views on Big Society.
• Carry out a longitudinal analysis of policy documents and review academic literature on Big and Civil Society
• Work with our three research partners to learn about what they do and how this fits with the Big Society agenda.
• Analyse the data and feed this back to our research partners and others to check and revise our findings through findings workshops.
• Place a ‘researcher in residence’ into the three partner organisations in order to give something substantive back to the groups.
• Share our findings through public engagement festival and conferences.

Katherine’s field notes

Self-Advocacy Meeting

“At the end of the meeting, Ally tapped me on the shoulder to show me her ipad. When I say spoken to her, we’d had to do it by writing as she’s recently had surgery on her ears and couldn’t hear very well. She showed me some photos with three lovely dogs and told me that after her mum died in June she moved in with Joanne and Keith as part of their family with their three dogs and teenage daughter. Ally explained that this had happened because her social worker had put her in touch with the ‘Shard Lives’ scheme (http://www.sharedlivesplus.org.uk/). Sometimes people with learning difficluties live with families, sometime families become befrienders and meet for an afternoon or so. Ally invited me to the next Shard Lives Forum to hear her speak, so I contacted the organiser and was able to book my place”.

Shared Lives Forum

“I met Ally at the forum, she wasn’t actually speaking this time because she had spoken at the last event but she was in charge of filming using her Ipad.

Karen, the Shared Lives, social worker and Kate, who uses Shared Lives, talked about the befriending scheme. Kate is friends with Lilly, they go to the bingo together, Kate taught Lilly how to play because she had never been before. They go to the cinema too. Kate and Lilly really enjoy each others company for a few hours a week.

I met Bernard and James who are best mates. They met through shared lives four months ago and meet once a week for four hours to go for walks and do a bit of shopping following. James was very close to his grandfather who died recently and Barry hoped he might be able to be a bit like a grandfather to James”

Being a researcher in residence means…

• Being there, spending time with people and getting to know them well.
• Not always trying to be the person in control but letting other people tell you what you need to do.
• Recognising the importance of what other people say and what they know.

Thinking about what people tell us: Analysis

• Self-advocates/people with learning disabilities have knowledge they want to share.
• Their ideas help everyone to think about some pretty big questions.
• One of these big questions is ‘what does it mean to be human?’.
• Lots of people in universities have asked that question when thinking about the lives of people with learning disabilities (Kittay 2002, Singer 2009).

Thinking about the dis/family

• We think that people with learning disabilities give us new ways of thinking about what it means to live well, to have a job, a family and to be a human.
• One way of being a human is to live in a family, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has the same sort of family.
• Ally’s story tells us that there are different kinds of families that they can be just as happy as ‘normal’ families.
• We think Ally’s family is a ‘dis/family’ because it is a family shaped by disability but just as good as a ‘normal’ family.

Doing theory

• Some people think that making up new words offers nothing new (Shakespeare 2013).
• Other people think that we should value the normal more and not keep trying to question what is normal (Watson and Vehmas 2013)
• People with learning disabilities are telling us that they want to be healthy, live well, have good jobs and a family – they want to be ‘normal’ (Boxall 2013)

But

• The self-advocates we have met are always doing things differently and demanding other people to do things differently too
• Just like Ally’s story of her ‘dis/family’. Ally’s family is normal but it is also shaped by disability in, we would argue, really positive ways
• This dis/family is a great family that gives Ally the ‘normal’ family life that she wants
• Perhaps all families are ‘disfamilies’.

Conclusions

We have been thinking about some BIG questions and we want to keep working together with all our partners to find some BIG answers too…

k.runswick-cole@mmu.ac.uk

d.goodley@sheffield.ac.uk

Co-Production in Practice Event

Co-Production in Practice

RESS (Research Exchange for the Social Services)

Tuesday, January 13, 2015 from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM (PST),

The Circle, 33 Rockingham Lane, S1 4FW, Sheffield

How does co-production work?

What are the processes and practices of ‘research without a map’?

RESS is holding an afternoon workshop called ‘Co-production in practice’ which focuses on the reality of working with co-production from a variety of different disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Participants will be encouraged to bring examples to share and contribute to a growing set of case studies that can be showcased on our blog.

Register your interest at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/co-production-in-practice-tickets-14222023455?ref=enivtefor001&invite=NzE5MzcyMS9oLmVzY290dEBzaGVmZmllbGQuYWMudWsvMQ%3D%3D&utm_source=eb_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=inviteformalv2&utm_term=yes&ref=enivtefor001

What is co-production?

Our first post is by Professor Kate Pahl from the University of Sheffield. Kate is Deputy Director at RESS and has championed co-production through research such as a Connected Communities project that explores how artists work within the AHRC Connected Communities programme as well as ‘Imagine’ which seeks to ‘experiment with different forms of community building that ignite imagination about the future and help to build resilience and a momentum for change’.   

Co-production – what is it?

The idea of co-production came initially from work within town planning where citizens were encouraged to co-produce services with government or police. It was found that this approach led to more equitable forms of governance and people felt they had more say over what happened.

Much initial work drew on Arnstein’s ladder of participation, which described a range of approaches from citizen to control to manipulation. Subsequent researchers considered the ways in which different forms of research could be found along this continuum.

In some cases, research bids could be written by community groups, research questions devised, methodologies agreed upon, data collected, and the research written up without the need for an academic partner. However, most often, academic researchers support community-led research, in order to provide contextual information and to advise on methods and literature. Within the field of childhood studies, children have been much more involved in research processes, with children participating in the shaping of the study, and the development of participatory methodologies including visual and embodied, situated methodologies.

Such shifts in the democratization of research have led to an increasing focus on the role of the university in creating equitable community-university partnerships. Leading the field has been the work of Angie Hart and colleagues (Hart and Wolf 2006, Hart et al 2013) at the University of Brighton who pioneered the concept of Community University Partnerships (CUPs) using a Communities of Practice approach, drawing on the work of Etienne Wenger.

Methodologies of co-production include Participatory Action Research (PAR), which has been useful as a conceptual and methodological approach that credits community partners in a key role in creating research ideas and seeing them through.

Another methodological approach is that of dialogic co-inquiry spaces, which has been taken by Sarah Banks at the University of Durham. In this approach, community partners and academics come together to share expertise and pool knowledge, and the structure of the space creates a more equitable framework for discussion.

Collaborative ethnography is also an effective way to sustain a research exploration by which community partners shape and frame research. Drawing on the work of Eric Lassiter and colleagues at Marshall University, this approach creates opportunities for universities and communities to work in sustained partnerships to do community research together.

Co-production as an emergent space

Part of the challenge of co-production is that research ideas, methodologies and ways of knowing are all co-constructed with community partners. At the University of Sheffield, a number of people are working through co-production, and thinking about ways of generating knowledge production with community partners. Methodologies used include arts based methodologies such as relational arts practice as well as collaborative ethnography, participatory action research and visual and embodied methodologies.

Our current work at RESS includes supporting this and developing methodological approaches that we hope will be of use to researchers from a variety of disciplines, and within a number of different contexts. As an emergent and growing field, we are excited about working at the forefront of co-production as a methodological and theoretical challenge.

Kate Pahl, University of Sheffield

September 2014