Authority Research Network: creative/performative approaches to democracy and authority research

The ARN is a group of early career researchers who are involved in reinvigorating debates about authority. This involves thinking about the dynamic and creative ways in which authority is fostered and how it contributes to community life. The need to think about authority and how it operates is timely, as traditional authority structures are seen to have been eroded and there are calls to reinstate these (e.g. after the riots of summer 2011). Recent years have also seen a movement of authority away from the state and into the hands of private organisations such as credit agencies, disability assessors and other "big society" organisations. Policy moves (e.g. the Localism Act) that threaten existing state-led structures have exacerbated the need to think about new ways of understanding and building the social aspects of contemporary life, and provide alternatives to the state-community-individual model. The erosion of trust in traditional authority (family, banks) continues and contributes to these concerns. The ARN has worked together for 3 years, organising symposia, conference sessions, retreats and writing a special edition of the Journal of Power, an article for Critical Inquiry and a pamphlet on authority and participation to be used by community practitioners and participatory researchers.
The core network consists of early career academics working at Universities of Brighton (Leila Dawney), Bristol (Naomi Millner, Tehseen Noorani), Plymouth (Julian Brigstocke) Warwick (Claire Blencowe), Paraiba, Brazil (Aecio Amaral) and Bath Spa (Sam Kirwan). The project will extend this network to academic and non-academic participants working both in the UK and in Latin America, where similar concerns are being investigated in community and local political settings and where there is potential for research development and cross-fertilisation of ideas. The project builds on the work undertaken during 2 previous AHRC projects and takes up themes identified during these projects to build durable collaborations with new partners.
The project will involve two symposia: "spaces and aesthetics of authority" and "the making of the common". The latter explores the notion of the "common" in philosophical and theoretical writings, in order to consider the role of knowledge and authority in the production of a shared life. The former emerges from a previous AHRC network project where a focus on the experience of authority was found to be central to understanding how it works and how it is generated through performances and practices (Dawney, Blencowe et al. 2011).
The symposia provide an opportunity to get to grips with new concepts and collectively produce workable ways of using those concepts in research practice which will lead to the development of a major participatory research project. They will feed into two retreats, which will provide time and space for creative thinking, collaborative writing, engagement with texts and the development of concepts and approaches. These will be supported by a creative writing expert and a visual artist to facilitate the production of creative, communicable material to be used in the larger research project and by colleagues working in community settings.
Having found their methods successful for their own career development, the ARN are keen to promote their distinctive working methods (retreats, diagramming and collaborative writing) to PhD students. The project will therefore include events at doctoral training centres (e.g. ESRC funded doctoral training centre network).
These activities will be supported by an intuitive webspace that enables discussion and peer review and provides a platform to archive, collect and disseminate creative and academic work that will form the beginning of a clear area of study called "new authority studies". This will prepare the ground for the development of a significant research project that explores new articulations of authority in community settings.

Impact 1: Policy makers, community practitioners and embedded researchers will be equipped with the knowledge and tools to both promote and foster forms of authority that work as a force for cohesive, resilient communities, and to resist those elements that may prove destructive. This will take place by developing an intellectually rigorous and theoretically informed understanding of the workings of authority in various social settings, as well as its changing and new articulations.
Impact 2: Academics will be better equipped to produce high-quality collaborative and participatory research through adoption of and experimentation with creative methods for concept development and for communication across academic boundaries, and between academics and non-academics.
The work of the ARN has identified a need to revitalise debates about authority in order to understand new and emerging forms of community life, non-dominating power and the democratisation of expertise, particularly in the context of the rolling back of state structures. The ARN has already made a significant contribution to theoretical and critical knowledge about authority and community production. This project will enable the movement of this knowledge from the academy into community settings through engaging with academics working with communities in the UK and in Latin America, and through recruiting community partners in order to develop a large-scale multi-sited research project investigating the diverse articulations of "new authority" in community and activist spaces. The project will create capacity for community organisations through focusing on the role that local knowledges can have in building community, and on actions that build and nurture authority as positive non-dominating power, as well as highlighting new marginalisations and new forms of domination that may emerge from the devolution of authority. Community partner meetings will feed into project development aiming to build capacity locally through experimenting with practices, knowledges and resource relations that produce and foster non-dominating authority relations.
Knowledge produced through this project can be drawn on by academics working with community partners, and will be communicated through 2 pamphlets, a website, a conference paper and 2 research papers. These will be distributed to colleagues working in community settings, on CCs projects, in Brazil, from community-university partnership programmes (CUPP, Univ. of Brighton) and contacts made through the activities of the network. Through these forms of dissemination, the project will act as a catalyst for new thinking about authority and community engagement. The emerging subdiscipline of 'New Authority Studies' will have an impact upon researchers in the humanities, social sciences and elsewhere.
This project contributes to the ongoing impact agenda by building bridges between theory and empirics and taking philosophical and theoretical concepts outside of the academy. It will provide a model of how theory can move into community settings through creative approaches such as diagramming, slow thinking and creative writing, and will be communicated to other academics who are wary of "crossing the bridge" between theoretical and community-focused research. Emerging researchers will be encouraged to adopt these ways of working and to participate in knowledge production through the 7 doctoral college talks. The ARN has historically used these methods as a means of developing theory and conceptual ideas, and this project moves this agenda forward by working with a creative writing practitioner and a visual artist to develop materials (self-published pamphlets) for participatory, experimental projects that will have a direct impact on both policy development and on the lives and practices of those people and places involved in this research. Pamphlets will be produced in both English and Portuguese.