Rachel Pain
Rachel Pain Geography
What does Coproduction mean to you?
For me it's definitely more of an approach to research, not a method. Co-production takes different forms but has a set of politics and ethics connected to it. The form I use is participatory research, so that's working with participants as co-researchers, who are often from more marginalized groups than academic researchers, so issues of self-representation become important.
Would you see Coproduction as having a specific ethical approach research?
- Absolutely. But there isn't really a specific ethics to coproduction generally, I think it very much depends on the type of coproduction model that you're pursuing. Certainly if you if you're doing participatory research, with respondents who might be considered as marginalized or having had difficult life experiences, obviously there's a there's a strong ethical imperative and
There's also the prospect of co producing ethics with research participants, which is not necessarily something universities are very familiar with - so taking a more iterative approach to ethics. At the moment you get your ethical clearance and you think you know what the project is about. But then when you actually start the research you are continuing to negotiate ethics, as new issues come up and you're trying new methods, so you might need changes to ethical practice as you as go on.
There’s also the idea of an ethics of care in research, which a lot of feminist researchers would recognize. That is, it's not just about not doing harm, but about protecting people and making some positive difference, in every encounter and every research session we have. Offering care or doing things in a caring way.
A lot of researchers talk about reciprocal research relations, how important it is to give something back, which I agree with, but I’m also a little bit cautious about that, because we can't prejudge what people want. And sometimes people are really happy just being involved in research and they don't necessarily want anything else out of it. I think that decisions around that should always come from them.
Why do you use coproduction? What was your path to this pedagogy?
I think I was using co production, long before it was called co production and my inroad into it is through participatory research. For me it was from the late 1990s, and particularly at that time looking at participatory research and development that was well-established in majority world countries, so that’s where the whole thing came from. By the late 1990s, people were starting to use participatory research in the UK, often with marginalized populations. In the policy sphere there was a lot of emphasis on engaging with young people and so-called “hard to reach” groups, and the Labour Government at the time and the voluntary sector open to funding this sort of work using participatory techniques and approaches - what we would now call co-creation of policy and practice. So that's where I came into it, and I do think that what emerged was a set of specific forms of co-production in the critical social sciences, whereas in other disciplines co-production can look very different.
How have you used this in your work?
I’ve been involved in numerous projects using participatory action research for over 20 years. One recent example was a project on trauma with domestic abuse survivors. We worked with a group of 10 survivors, I was leading the project along with Brenda Heslop, a musician, and we used various arts-based methods. She wrote and played music to us, and then she wrote songs based on the experiences that participants were sharing. It also involved a collaboration with a domestic abuse service, My Sister's Place in Middlesbrough. We couldn't have done that project without the close support of the service.
What other methods did you use in your work? How did these fit with your interest in coproduction?
I almost always use qualitative methods, including a range of participatory methods as well. In the last few years I’ve been using some arts-based methods, and working with artists, but I really feel really strongly that the hallmark of participatory research is not about methods. It is much more about the whole approach - it’s perfectly possible to use quantitative methods within a participatory approach - it's all about what is going to work well for those participants, what they want to do, and what is going to help to answer the research questions that they co-create.
What challenges have you faced in using coproduction?
I think that is different on each project. Thinking about the project I just mentioned, the organization weren’t really looking for anything specific - they were interested in the work, excited about the prospect of having music produced, and obviously also committed to the idea that we need to understand more about the experience of trauma as a lived reality rather than just a medical condition. So they helped to make the project a success.
On other projects in the past, one or two collaborations have been trickier. Because you can start out with the same set of objectives, but you need to build those over time, talk about them and work through problems, and so on. I worked on a project years ago where the organization got freaked out when the findings came out. They didn't necessarily like what the findings were telling them, and that can be really tricky because, obviously, the organization may be supporting or even funding the research but your first duty as an academic researcher is to support participants to represent whatever knowledge they produce. Especially in participatory research, that's what it's all about. It can't be about appeasing X organisation who don't necessarily want to hear about the stuff that, say, homeless kids are experiencing.
What do you wish you’d known before starting research that uses coproduction?
I think, certainly in the social sciences, there was a huge rush of enthusiasm 10-15 years ago to do coproduced research, and the thing I always say when I’m teaching or training people in this is to think seriously about what the outcomes might be. Creating new knowledge is one thing, but generally if you're doing this kind of research, the ethical imperative is that some kind of change needs to happen as a result of that. And not to be naive about how easy it's going to be to contribute to whatever those changes are, or make promises you can’t keep. Obviously, though, one of the benefits of co production, if you're working with other organizations, is that they can take on the findings and help to work towards those impacts.
Any advice you would give to someone interested in using coproduction?
Not to try to be a superhero! There's a brilliant paper by Ilan Kapoor which is a psychotherapeutic critique of participatory research and development, describing the participatory researcher as a kind of evangelical figure, coming into communities like the white saviour and actually the whole thing is all about them because it makes them feel good to work in that way, it's good for their ego and reputation. I think the key to co-production - and it's really hard as academics because it goes against everything that we're taught - is to let go of that desire for it to benefit you or to reflect well on you in some way.
And just to work more with people who are outside the Academy, and recognise that they probably know everything that you're going to tell them, and are probably already looking for solutions.
Also accepting that sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes people don’t want to co-produce research, they're much happier doing a questionnaire or something! Sometimes you're not going to get the findings that you expect, you're not going to get findings that are necessarily useful for your own personal research purposes. Or people don't always want to change anything, after talking through an issue for a long time. I guess that goes back to the institutional pressures that researchers have to have a “big” impact, when actually sometimes the biggest impact is the benefit people get just sitting around the table talking things through.