Autumn Non-Traditional Research Methods Network’s Event: Culture and the Assumptions about Knowledge

This Autumn, the Non-Traditional Research Methods Network brings you a double dose of mists and mellow fruitfulness in the form of our presenters, Dr Emily Ahmed, presenting alongside Assistant Professor Dr Charlie Davis and Senior Research Fellow, Dr Adam Matthews.

The Balance of Power – public contributor’s experiences of power and power sharing in the coproduction of UK health research (Dr Emily Ahmed, University of Warwick)

Power can be a tricky concept to engage with, but addressing power inequalities and sharing power are key aspects of co-production. Emily Ahmed presents her PhD research exploring “how power and power-sharing (or lack of) is experienced in the co-production of UK health research”. Power-sharing and addressing power inequalities are defining principles of co-production and effective co-production requires organisations to embrace more equal power distribution. Yet whilst there is an abundance of guidance and discussion to support implementation, there’s limited empirical evidence of how power and power-sharing is experienced in co-production, and a critical lack of public contributor voices within this.

Emily will share her journey from community engagement to PhD, she’ll discuss definitions of co-production, talk about her research asking, ‘how do public contributors experience power and power-sharing within the co-production of UK health research?’, present emerging themes and talk about how she has used creative methods to support accessibility, reflective thinking and dissemination.

Storytelling through Comics: A Heuristic for Fostering Creative Inquiries (Dr Charlie Davis, Assistant Professor in Higher Education, Faculty of Education, University of Nottingham; and Dr Adam Matthews, Senior Research Fellow, School of Education, University of Birmingham)

Producing educational fiction and media provide educational researchers with creative possibilities to speculatively imagine more socially just educational futures. In this discussion, we present a heuristic aimed at fostering such creative inquiries. The heuristic was developed through our participatory study using composite storytelling approaches to create multimodal-comics representing what it might mean to become an academic of working-class heritage. We reflect on the relationship between form and function; encoding and decoding and affordance as part of design processes to create educational fiction media aimed at provoking knowledge production across different social spaces. We argue that such creative approaches can foster convivial generative possibilities to create knowledge aimed at imagining more equitable educational futures.

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