We Make Progress Because we are Lost : Critical Reflections on CoProducing Knowledge as a Methodolog

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We Make Progress Because we are Lost Critical
Reflections on Co-Producing Knowledge as a
Methodology for Researching Non governmental
Public Action

• Professor Jenny Pearce Department of Peace
  Studies/International Centre for Participation
  Studies, University of Bradford
• ESRC Methods Festival 3/7/08

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• In 1977 we thought we knew where we were going.
  Today, by good fortune, we have no idea where we
  are going and we make progress because we are
  lost and we are forced to use the compass of
  Action Research. In those days, we thought that
  history was the bus to the New Jerusalem. Today
  our eyes are sharper, and we can see that history
  is a bus without a destination board (Molano,
  19988)

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Introduction

• Our Co-Producing Knowledge Method and the Family
  of Action and Participatory Research Methods
  What is the connection?
• Does NGPA research require a premise of working
  with non governmental actors
• Creativity of unexpected and contingent academic
  conventions, timescales and funding regimes
• Does our experience demonstrate that efforts to
  use participatory, interactive methods of
  research improves on the quality of knowledge
  produced (and how do we know)?

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Structure

• The production of knowledge with the
  researched the participatory methodology
  family and their epistemological quest
• Co-Producing knowledge in practice Challenges
  from co-researching municipal innovations in
  non-governmental public actio
• Conclusion

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1. The production of knowledge with the
researched the participatory methodology
family and their epistemological quest

• Family of methodologies (AR, Cooperative Inquiry,
  Feminist Transformatory Research, PAR/PRA/PLA
• Challenge premise of positivism that truth is
  only found by standing outside object of
  knowledge
• Truth in so far as it can be claimed, springs
  from quality of relationships built with the
  researched, ie deeper engagement with rather
  than distance from the object of knowledge
• Questions anthropological method of participant
  observation
• Cooperative inquiry is a political and
  epistemological commitment to researching with
  other people

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1. The production of knowledge with the
researched the participatory methodology
family and their epistemological quest

• Brief History Impact of 1960s,feminism,
  activists from South and development
  practitioners
• Share a radical questioning of expert,
  world-ordering knowledge
• Expansion and Appropriation challenges of 1990s.
• Under-theorisation Efforts to strengthen
  epistemological grounds

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1. The production of knowledge with the
researched the participatory methodology
family and their epistemological quest

• Epistemological Quest some shared roots in
  phenomenology, subjectivity and meanings actors
  give their social action.
• Search for an interpretation which is
  intersubjectively valid for all the people who
  share the same world at a given time in history
  (Rowan and Reason, 1981133)
• Quality of knowledge improves on positivist
  knowledge because it is derived from the
  meaningful experiences of all participants, is
  relevant to everyday lives and can lead to change
  which is self-generated and relevant to those
  lives

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The production of knowledge with the
researched the participatory methodology
family and their epistemological quest

• A personal, circular and contradictory process
  of knowing moving to and fro between experience
  and reflection
• Contingent potentialities and unthought
  possibilities
• Intelligent Agency, the Researcher and the Other
• Critical Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
• The Extended Epistemology
• Action and Knowing
• Democratising Content or Method?

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2. Co-Producing knowledge in practice Challenges
from co-researching municipal innovations in
non-governmental public action

• A true human inquiry needs to be based firmly
  in the experience of those it purports to
  understand, to involve a collaboration between
  researcher and subjects so that they may work
  together as co-researchers, and to be intimately
  involved in the lives and praxis of those
  co-researchers (Rowan and Reason, 1981133)
• Can/should any effort at knowledge with NGPA try
  to measure up to these high standards? Especially
  multi-site, multi-lingual projects such as ours?
• Six cities, four countries, 13 case studies,
  practical and theoretical objectives. Tracking
  with participants in new spaces of participation,
  how they use those spaces and how the to and
  fro between participant and researcher might
  enable research to contribute to more
  theoretically informed praxis.

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2. Co-Producing knowledge in practice Challenges
from co-researching municipal innovations in
non-governmental public action

• Weak rather than strong participatory inquiry
• Non Positive premises and appeals to Positivist
  premises in the data collection
• Tensions amongst researchers trained in the
  academy and those in activist research centres
• Feedback and Iteration
• Extended Epistemology
• Challenge and Collaboration
• Unexpected and Unpredictable

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Conclusion

• Ethical and normative coherence and integrity
  between field of inquiry (non-governmental public
  action) and researchers does imply a
  methodological shift.
• Quality of knowledge if measured according to
  enhancing reflexivity in social action, taking
  seriously the meanings given their action by
  researched, trust in knowledge generated
  amongst researched.
• Co-production does not escape the demand to
  clarify theory of knowledge on which it is based,
  and arguably its weakness in this has limited it
  so far. Teasing out those premises and developing
  them does help to ground the methodology in its
  distinct understanding of the purpose of human
  inquiry compared with other methodologies.

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Conclusion

• Also weakening it are the many problems created
  by the positivist premises which still permeate
  academic and government institutions and our
  training within those conventions and
  expectations towards those institutions amongst
  non governmental actors
• Should not be reified as a counter hegemonising
  methodology. Pluralist forms of knowledge
  production is healthy. However, there is an
  argument that it is only through some form of
  co-production and commitment to the creative
  connectivities between different forms of
  knowledge that the change potentials of
  differerent forms of non governmental public
  action will be recognised and ultimately more
  effectively realised