Taking Yourselves Seriously

This project aims to create useful knowledge from a research project called 'Co-producing Legacy' that looked at what artistic understandings and knowledge contributed to research within the Connected Communities programme. The original project found that ways of doing things from artistic practice could inform community oriented research. These ways of doing things include methodologies that were founded on tacit, experiential, visual and linguistic knowledges that are open to change and can be experimental. Artists can produce paintings, write poems and create sculptures; they can also challenge or question how people think about the world and approach everyday experience from a 'slant' perspective. Methodologies stemming from these approaches can enable the production of poetry, visual art and film as outputs as well as create a questioning space where failure, experimentation and different ways of knowing are brought to the fore. These could be described as 'methods' but not in a social scientific mode of enquiry. Artistic methodologies might be open -ended, non consensus seeking and involve tacit and materially situated forms of knowledge creation. We are going to trial these methodologies within three projects with a focus on social cohesion within communities, and explore how research methods generated from creative and artistic sources can support and enable community researchers to do their own research. We will be producing resources from our work with three projects drawing on the 'Co-producing Legacy' research project, but with a new focus on social cohesion.

The project team will work collaboratively with a national community research organisation, ARVAC (the Association for Research in the Voluntary and Community Sector) together with social cohesion experts from Sheffield City Council and Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council to embed artistic methodologies into community research through a series of focused projects. The projects will take place in a school in central Rotherham, a community context (British Asian Women's groups) and an adventure playground in Pitsmoor in Sheffield, UK.

The aim is to support sustainable and participatory research within communities that draws on artistic methodologies. The outcome will be a set of downloadable resources on the ARVAC website that can inform community researchers about the potential of this sort of research and ways of approaching such research, drawing on case studies and providing concrete examples of practice so that researchers can try out their own ideas.
This resource will be disseminated through the national networks that ARVAC can supply together with experts within the field of social cohesion. Our aim is to create a resource that disseminates the power and value of artistically informed research within communities to new audiences and can enable community and voluntary groups concerned about social cohesion to conduct their own research and disseminate this within communities.

1. Community researchers from the voluntary and community sector who wish to do research within communities but lack access to resources that inform them about artistic methodologies will benefit from the research. The most common methodologies that are most recognised in non academic i.e. community settings include questionnaires, interviews and case studies alongside quantitative surveys. Methodologies that draw on artistic notions of research, e.g. experimentation, uncertainty, visual and experiential knowledge and ways of knowing that are divergent and complex are less commonly understood outside universities. This project aims to draw on knowledge created in the 'Co-producing Legacy' project in order to support researchers in communities do research that benefits their communities. Our resources for community researchers will be produced in collaboration with the project team and developed and written for clarity and ease of reading by RA Goldstraw, who links to the partner organisation, ARVAC (The Association for Research in the Community and Voluntary Sector).
2. ARVAC will benefit, by having access to a body of knowledge that adds to their existing toolkit: 'Community Research: Getting Started' which provides researchers with ideas about ways of approaching research in community contexts. ARVAC aims to act as a resource for people interested in research in or on community organisations. This project will enable such researchers to access artistic methodologies.
3. The research will benefit schools who work with diverse pupils who wish to create innovative projects that support social cohesion through language. We have chosen to focus specifically on social cohesion following widespread concern after the Brexit vote and in the context of increased migration within the communities where we have chosen to work. The projects are all concerned with social cohesion across sites, spaces and generations and will generate research based knowledge that to support others to do similar research and carry out similar projects. Our aim is to produce resources, available on the project website to support schools who wish to develop ways of working in this way. Co-I Mcmillan will be instrumental in developing these resources.
4. We will also develop resources to support researchers working with British Asian women who wish to create an alternative language of success through artistic methodologies. A book of ideas on artistic methods to support narratives of identity with British Asian women will be produced with Co-I Rasool.
5. HEI's who work with community researchers to do co-produced research will benefit. During the year ARVAC aim to hold a number of regional based events in partnership with HEIs including Manchester Metropolitan University, Nottingham Trent University, University of East Anglia, University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, Edge Hill University and through their connections with academic partners universities in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the other English regions. In addition through their trustees they have direct access to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), a number of CVS organisations and the Voluntary Sector Studies Network. The University of Sheffield has links with N8 work on Co-production.
Community researchers will have access to resources that support artistic and creative types of research. The three projects will be able to trial approaches that are artistic including poetry, visual art, film and stories, in order to find out how the arts can support social cohesion. In their letter of support, ARVAC confirmed that the resulting research resources will be disseminated by them and they will be keen to make other researchers aware of the work. The resulting resources will be useful for schools, community groups, youth groups and researchers working in diverse communities who wish to undertake innovative community research.