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This innovative book examines the changing relationship between communities, citizens and the notion of the archive. Archives have traditionally been understood as repositories of knowledge and experience, remote from the ordinary people who fund and populate them, however digital resources have led to a growing plurality of archives and the practices associated with collecting and curating. This book uses a broad range of case studies which place communities at the heart of this exciting development, to illustrate how their experiences are central to our understanding of this new terrain which challenges traditional histories and the control of knowledge and power.

Policy Press

Connected Communities

Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices

There is an urgent need to rethink relationships between systems of government and those who are ‘governed’. This book explores ways of rethinking those relationships by bringing communities normally excluded from decision-making to centre stage to experiment with new methods of regulating for engagement. Using original, co-produced research, it innovatively shows how we can better use a ‘bottom-up’ approach to design regulatory regimes that recognise the capabilities of communities at the margins and powerfully support the knowledge, passions and creativity of citizens. The authors provide essential guidance for all those working on co-produced research to make impactful change.

Imagining Regulation Differently: Co-creating for Engagement

Based on a four-year research project which highlights the important role of community organisations as intermediaries between community and culture, this book analyses the role played by cultural intermediaries who seek to mitigate the worst effects of social exclusion through engaging communities with different forms of cultural consumption and production. The authors challenge policymakers who see cultural intermediation as an inexpensive fix to social problems and explore the difficulty for intermediaries to rapidly adapt their activity to the changing public-sector landscape and offer alternative frameworks for future practice.

Cultural Intermediaries Connecting Communities: Revisiting Approaches to Cultural Engagement

Heritage as Community Research explores the nature of contemporary heritage research involving university and community partners. Putting forward a new view of heritage as a process of research and involvement with the past, undertaken with or by the communities for whom it is relevant, the book uses a diverse range of case studies, with many chapters co-written between academics and community partners. Through this extensive work, the Editors show that the process of research itself can be an empowering force by which communities stake a claim in the places they live.

Heritage as Community Research: Legacies of Co-production

Offering a critical examination of the nature of co-produced research, this important new book draws on materials and case studies from the ESRC funded project ‘Imagine – connecting communities through research’. Outlining a community development approach to co-production, which privileges community agency, the editors link with wider debates about the role of universities within communities. With policy makers in mind, contributors discuss in clear and accessible language what co-production between community groups and academics can achieve. The book will be valuable for practitioners within community contexts, and researchers interested in working with communities, activists, and artists.

Co-producing Research: A Community Development Approach

Understanding how creative interventions can help develop social connectivity and resilience for older people is vital in developing a holistic cross-sector approach towards ageing well. Academics with a wide range of expertise critically reflect on how the built environment, community living, cultural participation, lifelong learning, and artist-led interventions encourage older people to thrive and overcome both challenging life events and the everyday changes associated with ageing. The book uses a range of approaches, including participatory research methods, to bring the voices of older people themselves to the foreground. It looks at how taking part in creative interventions develops different types of social relationships and fosters resilience.

Resilience and Ageing: Creativity, Culture and Community

This is a book that challenges contemporary images of ‘place’. Too often we are told about ‘deprived neighbourhoods’ but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this unique book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham. Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography and collaborative ethnography, this book literally and figuratively re-imagines a place. It is a manifesto for alternative visions of community, located in histories and cultural reference points that often remain unheard within the mainstream media. As such, the book presents a ‘how to’ for researchers interested in community collaborative research and accessing alternative ways of knowing and voices in marginalised communities.

Re-imagining Contested Communities: Connecting Rotherham through Research

Bringing together academics, artists, practitioners and ‘community activists’, this book explores the possibilities for, and tensions of, social justice work under the contemporary drive for community-orientated ‘impact’ in the academy. Threading a line between celebratory accounts of institutionalised community engagement, self-professed ‘radical’ scholarship for social change and critical accounts of the governmentalisation of community, the book makes an original contribution to all three fields of scholarship. Showcasing experimental research and co-production practices taking place in the UK, Australia, Sweden and Canada and within universities, independent research organisations and internationally prestigious museums and galleries, the book considers what research impact could look like for a wide range of audiences and how universities could engage with different publics in ways that would be relevant and useful, but may not necessarily be easily measurable. Asking hard questions of the current impact agenda, the book offers an insight into emerging routes towards co-production for social justice.

The Impact of Co-production: From Community Engagement to Social Justice

Universities are increasingly being asked to take an active role as research collaborators with citizens, public bodies, and community organisations, which, it is claimed, makes them more accountable, creates better research outcomes, and enhances the knowledge base. Yet many of these research collaborators, as well as their funders and institutions, have not yet developed the methods to ‘account for’ collaborative research, or to help collaborators in challenging their assumptions about the quality of this work. This book, part of the Connected Communities series, highlights the benefits of universities collaborating with outside bodies on research and addresses the key challenge of articulating the value of collaborative research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Edited by two well respected academics, it includes voices and perspectives from researchers and practitioners in a wide range of disciplines. Together, they explore tensions in the evaluation and assessment of research in general, and the debates generated by collaborative research between universities and communities to enable greater understanding of collaborative research, and to provide a much-needed account of key theorists in the field of interdisciplinary collaborative research.

Valuing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research: Beyond Impact

The creative citizen unbound introduces the concept of ‘creative citizenship’ to explore the potential of civic-minded creative individuals in the era of social media and in the context of an expanding creative economy. Drawing on the findings of a 30-month study of communities supported by the UK research funding councils, multidisciplinary contributors examine the value and nature of creative citizenship, not only in terms of its contribution to civic life and social capital but also to more contested notions of value, both economic and cultural. This original book will be beneficial to researchers and students across a range of disciplines including media and communication, political science, economics, planning and economic geography, and the creative and performing arts.