Matthew Allen

On 15 November, as part of the Making Links Conference, Marcus Foth and I organised a workshop entitled Research for Action: Networking University and Community for Social Responsibility . Participants included researchers and activists, based in both universities and community organisations, and the following is a broadbrush summary of some things I learned from participating in a great day (with apologies for any errors in interpretation of what went on).

(Posted before the final discussion, so I can concentrate on that plenary)

Acknowledgment of the great people who spoke today at the bottom.

Some of what I discuss is:

• There is no one model for cross-sectoral collaborative research organisation
• Research projects change; research is projection
• The grant or article is not the motivation
• The silent partners of research
• Who is the researcher?
• Research and action have different timeframes
• Learning / Education and research
• Research, knowledge work, networked ICTs
• Show me the money

There is no one model for cross-sectoral collaborative research organisation

Three (or more) models of research for action (drawn from contributions from Kath Albury, Marian Tye and Helen Merrick)

• the collaborative project, articulating complex array of partners around a specific issue, involving funding, participants and university researchers
• the choreography – diverse bodies in motion, all in relatively simple partnerships, but the overall result is complex
• the personal is professional – passion in life underpins research and living. There’s no ‘group’ out there except one to which researcher already belongs.

All three models involve aspects of the other.

Difference between research as a specific search for new knowledge (more or less applied), for which a partnership might be needed or which must be used, and research as a state of mind or view of engaging with the world. Research collaborations could be one or the other or lead from one to the other. Just be careful about keeping clear what is needed and possible.

Research projects change; research is projection

The research project does not exist extant of the collaborative partnership: the project must be regularly reframed to suit the shifting circumstances that are exposed by doing the research. The shifts in circumstances can be both organisational (ie changes in the way the partnership is being operationalised) and also epistemological (what you ‘know’ changes). The project is a ‘projection’, a throwing forward or imagining of where the outcomes will emerge and how, rather than a fixed container.

The grant or article is not the motivation

Researchers who are employed within universities should not approach the collaborative community partnerships by saying ‘what is the grant I can get; what are the publications I can generate IF I make this link’. Rather, they should ask ‘what is the social, knowledge benefit that can be achived FOR the people who are in action’. The consequences (grants, publications) – the currency of academic success – can follow from the productive partnership rather than being the reason for its existence. At the point when the partnership (not the academic) will benefit from such ‘academic’ successes then they can become part of the explicit doing of the partnership’s work. While this statement might be seen solely as a moral stance which admits to the requirements to understand the aims of social research for action, it is also a pragmatic statement of efficiency: seeking the grant, thinking of the article will not actually create the conditions for partnership.

The silent partners of research

Research collaborations between community organisations and academic researchers always involve ‘silent’ partners whose needs and expectations must also be considered. For example, a silent partner for an academic might be her Head of School who manages her workload and thus, even while not present, is still involved in some way, involved in the sense that this person influences the research almost without knowing it. Community organisations represent, but are not the same as, the whole population that is their collective: these people too are silent partners. Governments, funding bodies, the media who might report on research are all silent partners too. I advance this idea simply to suggest that one of the ways in which trust and explicit sharing of expectations and needs can be done more effectively is if the speaking partners articulate, to one another, the silent partners who might, nevertheless, influence that project.

Who is the researcher?

Research for action implies that the identity of the researcher is not as clear as in traditional research collaborations (between the normatively academic researcher and the group who has a problem they can’t solve). Researchers, from the academy, should perhaps be research coaches who empower the researchers already working within the community by simply refining the attitudes so that they come to see their work as research. Similarly, the community workers may be doing the research by simply doing their job: the research outcomes might first occur within the community and only then become extracted into ‘research forms’ that are conventionally understood as research. The academic researcher, in this case, is a follower, or observer. The academic researcher might also be the solution to the organisation’s needs!

A related point: whether something is research is also contestable – and ‘doing research’ has its own politics: if it suits a community organisation to be ‘doing research’ then academics can help reframe the work in that way. Researchers, from universities, often need to suspend their desire for research outcomes to recognise instead their desire for involvement. Such a step might actually be quite liberating and productive for it frees academics from some of the more foolish ‘research management’ games which the formal assignment of the title ‘research’ can entail.

An additional point, picking up a different meaning of ‘who’: there is a big difference between researchers who are established institutional academics, emerging academics, doctoral students and so on.

Research and action have different timeframes

One theme from the workshop – timeframes are different for ‘research’ and ‘action’. These timeframes can come into conflict in several ways  – time taken to prepare the research (funding, ethics, clearance); time taken to publish results (scholarly journals): these are not very ‘active’ in the sense that a pressing problem require more urgent action. At the same time, while not invalidating the need for action, research works because it doesn’t jump to conclusions: the suspension of judgment opens the space to discover something new; the time taken can be productive of the civic intelligence that research can build (it is very process oriented). Maybe one answer is to run the research project as action in parallel with the research project  research and pragmatically map out the points of overlap

Related point: the disinterest of the researchers is paramount within the scientific paradigm; the degree of disinterest actually operating in many social realms might be much less than ideal but disinterest itself remains part of the conventional discourse of research. In many community research projects, interest is the mainspring for both initiating the research and the research methods chosen. I make this point because the apparatuses of research that take the time (ethics clearance etc) are often design to ensure / embed the ‘disinterest’.

Learning / Education and research

I am unable to make a clear statement on this point yet, but it seems to me that the collaboration for many, between university researchers and community organisations, is a collaboration between systemic learning (the outcome of research) and individual learning (becoming educated): researchers, on their own, discover knowledge that might or might become learned; but through links with community organisations – where the research comes from that organisation – enable action that is for the knowledge to become learned. Apologies: this doesn’t make much sense yet. But, to bring order to these thoughts: consider ‘popular education’ as the basis for knowledge production questions and activities (thanks Dan!).

Research, knowledge work, networked ICTs

In relation to ICTs and networks, many of the projects identified during the workshop involved social media, digital stories, creative online media, politics of information, expliciting networking and so on. These kinds of projects produce some interesting effects in relation to research. First, they generate textual materials which then serve as the research object; but, more importantly, they remodel the knowledge production process. In the end, research is about producing knowledge: where the tools or means of production (as well as the maintenance of social conventions about what counts as knowledge) remain the hands of a narrow elite, then everyday people cannot ‘do research’ because they are excluded from the knowledge-work apparatus. But now, ICTs, networks, creative digital technologies, make people researchers in the sense that they create, share, mashup and reflect upon knowledge. Once again, research becomes a tricky word: is it the meeting point for academics and community and political groups? Does the shared work of understanding what ‘research’ is (when it is now spread across society in different domains) create the basis for the productive partnerships?

Show me the money

(Apologies: it is not just money). What mostly connects community organisations and researchers within universities is the desire to achieve something new, which changes lives, but without all or most of the resources available to achieve them. To conclude this summary of what I took away from the workshop: partnerships make sense where the work necessary to achieve the partnership achieves more than simply using that time in other productive ways. Researchers and social activists and community developers just don’t have time to waste: but they don’t have enough resources to not contemplate how working together might save them time. Similarly, a researcher might need community organisation to secure the money; a community organisation might need a researcher to get funding. Only when those interests align can they two collaborate to ‘steal’ from those who dispense the funds – normally governments and corporations with other agendas, limited money and requirements that can be met by alliance.

—————————————————————————

Thank you to:

• Doug Schuler (see also my summary of Doug’s keynote)
• Kath Albury (UNSW)
• Marian Tye (Curtin U)
• Helen Merrick (Curtin U)
• Tanya Notley (TTC)  – one example, http://www.informationactivism.org/
• Tim Norton (Oxfam) – one example http://3things.org.au/
• Dan O’Reilly-Rowe  (USyd) – one example http://global-action.org

Tags: action research, making links

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 15:24 and is filed under Events, Summits and Workshops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.