Introduction

Collaborative, co-produced research is positioned as increasingly essential to the university in delivering public good and in finding answers to the increasingly ‘wicked’ problems that we face as social researchers (Facer and Enright, 2016). Important questions need to be asked concerning how far current regulatory norms and practices around research maximise insights and the realisation of transformative change. In the UK at least, despite the prominence of ‘co-production’ in higher education research funding strategies, the balance in research funding remains weighted towards research in which problems and interests are identified from within the academic community. This chapter tells the story of a research project that aimed to develop more equitable and inclusive ‘regulatory systems’ around the production of knowledge concerning the isolation and loneliness of older people. As such, this is a chapter about regulation in, and of, research programmes that is intended to highlight the way in which ‘top-down’ regulation, embedded in university ethical processes, funder requirements and forms of accountability around research, create particular relations between universities and publics. This article draws attention to alternative regulatory systems for knowledge production emerging from our co-produced research process that draw particularly on feminist concerns centred on an ethic of care. We call this ‘care-ful’ research.

In order to explore these alternative regulatory systems, the chapter examines how we ‘care-fully’ co-produced regulatory structures during our research with older people around an increasingly ‘publicly’ discussed issue of the loneliness of older people. Research into isolation and loneliness tends to focus on the psychological and medical causes or consequences of loneliness (Schirmer and Michailakis, 2015). In our work, we wanted to understand how the loneliness of older people is framed and understood across society and, particularly, by older people themselves. In this chapter, we consider how adopting an ethic of care, founded on accounts in feminist thinking (Beasley and Bacchi, 2007; Code, 2015; Bellacasa, 2017; Sörensson and Kalman, 2017), supported us to practically co-create and sustain a particular set of regulatory systems and processes around our research.