Introduction

This book focuses on a ‘community development approach’ to the co-production of research. By this we mean research undertaken collaboratively by several parties that values multiple perspectives and voices; contributes to creating and developing communities of place, interest and identity; builds collective capacity for action; and works towards social change.

The contributors were all involved in a five-year research project, Imagine – Connecting communities through research (see www.imaginecommunity.org.uk). The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded the project, focusing on exploring the contexts in which civic engagement takes place – that is, how people become engaged in civic life. The chapters in the book draw on the authors’ experiences as academics, artists, community activists, residents, service users, third sector employees and research students in the co-production of research; some of our identities are such that we belong to more than one of these categories.

In this chapter we discuss the field of co-production in research and how we understood this within the Imagine project. We also describe our understandings of the processes and practices of community development; how co-produced research can contribute to community development; and how community development principles and practices can enhance co-produced research. One of the contributions of the book is to offer a way of thinking about the co-production of research as a process of community development that provides a link between knowing and doing.

The Imagine project involved academics working with a range of people in different roles, including artists, museum educators, youth workers, community workers, activists, local residents, teachers, young people and policy-makers. The project drew on a number of disciplinary areas, including history, social sciences, arts practice, architecture and literary theory. Hence the chapters in this book reflect a broad conceptualisation of ways of knowing and working across universities and communities. We propose a community development approach to the co-production of knowledge that draws on modes of engagement that are themselves rooted in a number of traditions, including community activism (Lees, 1975; Ledwith and Springett, 2010) and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998; Hart et al, 2013) as well as socially engaged arts practice and community arts (Kester, 2011; Bishop, 2012).

We, the co-editors of the book, are all academics working in UK universities, yet we come from varied backgrounds and offer perspectives from different disciplines and lived experiences.