Co-producing legacy:What is the role of artists within Connected Communities projects?

The Connected Communities (CC) programme involved artists in many ways, as facilitators, as mechanisms for community engagement, as poets, film makers, painters, to deliver workshops and crafts sessions and also as researchers. However, their contribution to the co-production of knowledge with community partners is insufficiently understood. This project will consider the impact of artists on the Connected Communities projects in order to create a deeper understanding of the ways that artists stimulate particular kinds of change within these projects.
This will involve a review of all 250 projects, together with a literature review on arts practice and co-production, and then a more detailed focus on six projects that have used artists in innovative ways.
Three case studies have been selected building on existing and new relationships developed at the Edinburgh Summit in July 2013. The team have developed further actions to explore in more depth the way artists have worked with communities. The focus of the project is to consider the ways in which artists have changed and will change the way CC projects are conceptualised, developed and delivered and the extent to which arts practice supports co-production methodologies. This will then be delivered as an investment into long term AHRC CC strategy which can illuminate future research involving artists in projects that are co-produced with communities.
The form of the enquiry will be through the studio as process. The studio is a conceptual space where groups form and grow things which emerges from something we recognise as working already. It involves a group of people who operate beyond the structures of the university and recognises different types of expertise - all participants can emerge as 'experts'. It is adaptable and responsive to particular situations and is a space of action, process, and practice. It is not a physical space, a digital environment, or a structured set of meetings. It is at root an approach and not an institution. We will draw on the studio to co-produce an enquiry into the role of artists. We aim to illuminate the ways in which artists work in community contexts with a specific inquiry into how they contribute to change within communities and within the projects already funded.
Although we are focusing on artists, we see this focus as a way in to exploring the legacy of CC projects and their co-production methodologies more generally.
The project team will develop this enquiry in conversation with national policy makers in the field of cultural policy-making. The project team includes artists, A-N The Artists Information Company, Castlefield Gallery, community partners, artist researchers and academics from a variety of disciplines. The study will explore through reflection, action and a collaborative studio space the process of artists working with communities, which will result in a series of actions, papers and a report to go to AHRC Connected Communities programme. In the process of doing this, the team will also look more closely at the ethical framework surrounding artists' work in communities, drawing on the work of community partners. The project will also be disseminated and discussed with national body Arts Council England, who have offered support, and A-N Artists Information Company. The aim is to set up a space where the role of artists within CC becomes more fully understood, with a team that includes those already involved in CC projects, as well as new academics, artists and community partners.
Our outputs will include a shared blog, a joint article, an exhibition, a report to the Connected Communities programme plus four discussion papers and a book on studio spaces focusing on the legacy of Connected Communities as a programme.

We have co-produced our impact plan statement with partners Castlefield Gallery and A-N Artists' Information Company. Both of these organisations have given us considerable help in crafting the proposal and will be key to the subsequent dissemination of our research. We will, for example, in conversation with A-N Artists Information Company, interact with the 18,000 artists who receive the newsletter. A-N can disseminate and publish a series of position papers, provocations and discussions through their digital links and we will also work with them closely as we work through the project. In addition, through our project partner, Castlefield Gallery, we will work with a wide group of artists who are currently engaged with that gallery, and, through a small bursary system, bring them into this project. We also have links, through artist Karen Smith, with the 'Cultural Intermediation: Connecting Communities in the Creative Urban Economy' project, and will be holding a seminar, in collaboration with this project, which will offer an opportunity to engage in critical debate and dialogue around artistic practice and communities particularly with regard to the role of artists in Connected Communities research. This will engage a much wider group who are working on the role of artists and creative practitioners in collaborative research projects, with 'communities' and in community and participatory action. Through A-N Artists Information Company, we will also engage with the Paul Hamlyn/AHRC-supported Artworks initiative: the Navigator Artworks consortium of A-N-n, Artquest, Engage, Foundation for Community Dance, National Association of Writers in Education and Sound Sense which supports the continuing professional development of artists working in participatory settings.
It is anticipated that this research will have impact in both academic and community contexts and will be valuable for researchers and artists alike. It will have a cross-disciplinary appeal, as it seeks to unite currently disparate assessments of the role of art and artists in community contexts across the Arts and Humanities. We will link through international partner James Oliver to the Centre for Cultural Partnerships at the University of Melbourne.
In addition to publications in academic journals, our project will be publicised firstly through a project Blog and Twitter feed which will be maintained by the RA's. This will track the emerging studio space and its form and will be a publically accessible forum for recording findings and generating debate. We will be disseminating our findings through a multi-platform output, all interrelated, including an exhibition at Castlefield Gallery which would be a symposium.
We will include within outputs multimodal and visual content to make our work accessible. Our model of impact is not that we disseminate out so much as learn from the communities we are working with, that is, in this project the 250 Connected Communities projects, the artists involved with them and the wider group of artists who work with communities across the UK and beyond. We see this project as one that both pilots a new way of working, the 'studio', but also makes our knowledge widely available as it emerges and provides a space to interrogate that knowledge within the process of doing the project. We would also aim to impact upon the AHRC Connected Communities programme, its commissioning processes and its understandings of the ways in which knowledge is constructed across University and Community contexts using the studio model of practice. We would also hope that the role of artists in the process of working with communities will be disseminated more widely across the CC programmes through the NCCPE and the CC Showcase events as well as in existing projects such as the large grants.