Re-Imagining Research Co-Production: Dramatizing a Speculative State of the Youth

Abstract

This article proposes an innovative approach for attending to and imaginatively engaging with the co-production in research co-production. Research co-production is a popular approach across diverse disciplines and national contexts but there are still questions as to what it means to co-produce research. In response to this problem, I propose we attend to and imaginatively engage with the co-production agenda’s neoliberalizing concerns, its histories, inheritances and functions, which relate to the neoliberalization of the state, society and the university. Drawing on the work of speculative and process approaches, especially A.N. Whitehead and Isabelle Stengers, the article dramatizes a co-produced research project focused on youth loneliness. Dramatization is an approach that seeks to find new stories, resources, and imaginations from which we might find a new beginning for our research practice. Four propositions drive this process of dramatization: inspire research co-production as eventful, admit that which we resist in co-production, move from contradictions to contrasts, and imagine state-like forms for research co-production. The eventful outcome is the re-imagining of co-production in relation to a speculative state-like form that is appropriate to authorize and value the collaborative knowledge that is created in collaborative research.