The co-productive imagination: a creative, speculative and eventful approach to co-producing research

ABSTRACT

This article explores the co-production of research as creative, speculative, and eventful rather than as research processes determined by equality, empowerment and social justice. There are persuasive critiques of participatory and co-produced methods. In response, the case is made for focusing instead on the complex processes through which ideas, affects and relational capacities emerge, are nurtured or obscured, and circulate as part of the complex processes of co-producing research. The argument is developed with reference to a recent research project on youth loneliness. Through process philosophy and speculative approaches, the co-productive imagination illuminates the necessary imaginative work of conceiving propositions, techniques of relation and methodological tactics that move us through creative advance to eventful realisations that something in our research matters! Through an ethics of the event the aim of research becomes collaboratively creating new potentials in a world in process.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-production
• whitehead
• event
• speculative
• youth loneliness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Co-operative Foundation.

Notes on contributors

James Duggan

James Duggan is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education, Manchester Met University. His research mobilises creative and co-produced research methods to engage with young people and communities on questions of loneliness, isolation and belonging. He is co-author of Batsleer and Duggan (2020)Young and Lonely: The social conditions of loneliness, published by Policy Press.