 I'm not a community researcher, so I'm not going to pretend I'm not, but I am an academic collaborator with community researchers and so I'm offering that perspective, although I am drawing on quite a lot on a chapter that's been, that's going to be forthcoming with hope sometime next year for policy press that's looking at our experience of collaboration that's authored by a combination of university researchers, practitioners and community researchers who identify themselves as what we often call lived experience researchers, I'll say perhaps a bit more about that later. I mean perhaps it would just be helpful to get a sense in the room, I mean at this conference it might be easy to assume that everybody's an academic but there might not be, so who here would describe themselves as an academic? Yeah, okay, so there's some people who here would describe themselves as a community partner researcher? Yeah, yeah, okay, but what about a student? I mean I would count that as academic, maybe somebody, yes, okay. I'm trying to get the man who hasn't raised, there's two of you who haven't raised your hands to either of those labels, so I don't want to put you on the spot you see, I'm trying to guess what your labels are, but maybe you're a professional working in a practitioner of some kind? Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. You're working, okay, so yes, so I think we would label you as a practitioner, and when we had, and we've got a project at the moment where we're collaborating with people in local government with Blackpool Council and so on, so a real mixture of what we have in our research, although here I suppose we've got a mixture of what we might label practitioners and academics but fortunately we've got community partner researchers on the panel to share their experience. I'm just going to talk for about 10 to 15 more minutes, not quite 15, about the Imagine project, which was part of the whole Connected Communities program of which Creative, sorry, Productive Margins was part of two. Our project, the Imagine project, was interested in exploring ways in which universities and communities could engage, in research that help people imagine and potentially bring into being better futures. It was a very broad remit, and there were kind of four strands of the project. I was involved one which was labeled the social context and what we were interested in was ways in which community and universities could collaborate to research but also try and bring about ways in which we can make more resilient collective futures. I'm not going to go into the detail of the topic about that so much because I'm really talking about that process of collaboration, which is one of the big learning things from the Imagine program as the whole, so try and understand how can universities and community partner researchers effectively collaborate. We began in collaboration with the Greta Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organization and colleagues at the University of Brighton carrying out a scoping review of what we know already and interviewing both community partners and academics from higher education about their experiences of collaborating in research. Their findings were that what makes for effective partnership is that people understand it's an ongoing learning experience, not expecting things necessarily to be perfect but an openness for both partners to learn from it. A degree of trying to accept that there are differences but actually trying to reframe those into opportunities and that's something I'm going to come back to later. This sense of actually not being afraid of difference or boundaries but rather of trying to harness that. Honesty about power dynamics. I say honesty about that because actually it's not necessarily about saying we can completely equalise power dynamics. In a lot of ways academics have a lot of privilege with regard to engaging in things but also awareness of power dynamics actually think about the consequences and trying to minimise the negative impact of those becomes important in a very practical way. I mean that sort of constant sort of battles with various funders about making sure that community partners receive relevant funding for participation and so on. Really thinking about the social aspect of the partnership so when we meet, paying attention to that, playing to each other's strengths and perhaps something else is that sometimes perhaps academics like myself who spend a lot of time doing research can think that well it's kind of almost all or nothing but there's this notion that actually people can collaborate in things. People can participate with different levels of involvement and actually being a collaborator doesn't mean that everybody has to put the same amount of time in. People are familiar with the communities of practice literature, Etienne Bengo might have come across his term a bit jargonistically but legitimate peripheral participation. The notion what that means is that actually sometimes people on the edge can bring most to it. In fact colleague here from government we had one of the really interesting sessions we had. We had somebody coming from a local authority who just attended one afternoon but it was really interesting that person outside coming in and offering something, offering a perspective that helped energise the discussion that was happening within our collaboration. In our imagine project we had done four, fifteen different community university projects that were looking at how people responded to different types of adversities, be they health, discriminatory, we had strands around child and family resilience, we had strands around teacher and school resilience, we had strands looking at young adult resilience, they were looking at projects with people with learning disability. They were looking at mental health challenges and then we were also looking at resilient models in practice research. Quite a diverse range of projects but by their very nature it meant that actually we had a combination of academics, practitioners and people with lived experience often of quite challenging health and social issues. We used a community to practice approach and that's people from the work of Venga which is the notion of bringing together people who share a common concern and they were kind of originally designed to cut across organisation barriers and hierarchies but they kind of developed in quite a mono professional culture. The first communities of practice were formed within organisations or within single professionals but actually over the last decade gradually been used for more mixed collaborations of people from diverse backgrounds and we were using it to combine what we called lived experience experts, practitioners and academics. One of the key ways, our project went on for about five years, we actually used research retreats which sounds a very dry sort of term but actually we didn't label them retreats until or we didn't use the term until towards the end but that meant we had annual meetings where we all came together from these different projects and there's a lot of guidance about research retreats into disciplinary work but very much located within the academic world. As we were wanting to use these meetings and bringing together peoples over two days to bring together those different types of knowledge and expertise. The challenges were those different knowledges, the professional academic and lived experience and how we could combine them without any one group dominating. Those issues of power and some honesty in declaring them, uncertainties about where this was all going because I suppose in many ways it was a lot of action research processes going on and different world views both in relation to the different perspectives people were coming from but also because it wasn't just a UK project, there were projects from other parts of Europe and Malaysia. We found, there were some key things that we really lessons that we felt were learned in terms of this process. We're not saying we did everything successfully but some of the key things we learned was the importance of thinking about how we formed those collaborations in the first place, how we can best involve people with those different types of knowledge. Later I'll come back to actually different ways we use things and we talk about boundaries and trying to make boundaries creative and we talk about notions of boundary objects, things that people can share in common that help people understand each other's perspective. A key thing is to actually agree what knowledge and what expertise is and to validate those types of knowledge that often certainly in the academic world might not be privileged. Academic knowledge is often privileged, sometimes policy knowledge is privileged and other types of knowledge sometimes aren't even seen as knowledge. So a key part is to validate knowledge, be it coming from people's lived experience of living with health or social challenges or academic knowledge or practitioner knowledge and the people to feel the legitimacy of their own knowledge. Sometimes it's necessary for people to actually build up their confidence, set believe in discussing and feeling about their knowledge and designing exercises for people to do that if it looks like one type of knowledge claim is dominating. The academic world words often dominate, not always but often do. We made a point of having a community artist recording our sessions and that was an important part of the record too. We used creativity quite a lot. This was actually a visual representation of actually a very dynamic session but also where there was quite a lot of tension being exchanged between people and for all of us we felt that Lisa's image here captured it very well. One of the problems is that people go into these projects or challenges with different expectations. Community partners, practitioners of organisations are often looking for concrete, quite rapid outcomes in terms of seeing it as an opportunity to develop interventions particularly in a time of austerity. They have stakeholders who are wanting to see those results quickly. Academics sometimes are going in with a view to journal articles that might not be produced and published for many years down the line. Their different expectations coming in and I suppose part of what we have to do was accept that but understand that and understand what that meant for us and what that meant for the project and agreeing the outputs and what times those needed to happen. In our research retreats where we got together for two days every year we paid quite a lot of careful attention to where these happened. Probably one of the, we tried to pick some of the neutral spaces so I only once did we meet in a university space because it was connected with a wider imagine project of where they were doing an exhibition. Perhaps one of the best spaces was a further educational college that supported people with a range of health challenges and it was during their vacation and so we had that sense of a space but it wasn't a space that felt like it necessarily belonged to any one group of people. Similarly in terms of activities actually to make sure it wasn't all verbal speaking out a bit like I'm doing here but we have had a range of different activities and noticing the value of downtime and the discussions to begin with we had a bit too much at a timetable stuff a bit like we look at this programme and not enough time for people just to sit and talk in breaks. So we tried to get people moving around and doing things. Here was an exercise thinking about networks, networks of support and so on but to represent things to enact concepts not just to talk about concepts. OK, so I'd sort of get towards towards the towards the end I wanted to cross come back to this issue of boundaries and this very much borrows from the work of Etienne van Gogh and Oh sorry, I'm hearing it. I thought somebody was telling me to wind up. The notion of boundaries and trying to harness boundaries creatively rather than just trying to pretend they don't exist always to see them as problems. One notion was a notion of helping people to cross boundaries boundaries between academic practitioner and lived experience research and activities that might support that kind of boundary crossing. We had done one session actually. The example of that was somebody quite familiar with bio dance. It's a particular type of dance. It's something actually that made a lot of people, including myself, feel somewhat uncomfortable. But what was quite nice about it is it made everybody, nearly everybody, apart from the person who knew the person they brought in, actually feel uncomfortable with it. So there was kind of a unity of experience in that sense so that it didn't feel like it belonged to any one group. So there was a disrupting of comfort zones. It wasn't something we did right at the beginning because actually I don't think people would have felt comfortable at all engaging in that. I think this happened in something like the third retreat when people started to know each other more. And there were some people who chose not to take part but it was a way for people to reflect on what their experience had been like in the research project and try to express that through this medium of bio dance. But to think of activities that encourage that kind of boundary crossing mutual understanding. And the other notion of boundaries is boundary objects. So an example of that Lisa's drawing there could be conceived of as a boundary object. A representation that's crossing boundaries of artistic expression, reflecting on a debate, an object that people can look at from different perspectives. That's an example perhaps of a creative object. Other boundary objects for practitioners might be practice tools, assessment tools, things that people have developed around supporting resilience. Or more academic tools related to evaluating research and trying to make those objects ones which can be commonly communicated by people. And the third kind of boundary factor here that's something that really important to consider is boundary spanners, people who have more than one identity. I mean actually it's a bit odd to say okay who's an academic researcher, who's a community researcher and we're all members of communities. We all have lived experience of various things, true some people have more challenging or acute experience but that can include academics, it can include practitioners. And something about the whole process of actually recognizing different types of knowledge is very interesting because it actually encouraged practitioners and academics to feel more comfortable and open about some of their other identities and their non-academic identities and about using that and bringing that into research. But boundary spanners, people who genuinely have a thought in a number of camps actually we found could be really quite central to help keep the processes going and promote understanding. We used a technique again from Etienne and Beth Vangatrain called Distributed Leadership. I mean you don't just need to use that technique but in these meetings and bringing together we had a lot of attention to different clusters of people who would have different tasks to focus on whether people's voices are being heard, what messages were being formed for external stakeholders. Looking at how people were experiencing the environment, taking a critical look at the activities, meeting twice every day to review on that and report back to people and making these groups of people of the Distributed Leadership groups, ones which had a mix of people from different knowledge claims. These were just some examples which I'll quickly show and then I'll finish. This is the value creation framework which was one example of one of those boundary spanning tools, ways in which we saw value as emerging from our process, values of sharing, values being applied, what impacts we generated, what transformations were made in our communities and in our processes. It actually, we found this a really useful tool. In fact it was somebody who ended up leaving school at 16 who actually presented this to the wider group and felt most really developed a confidence in this because although perhaps it looked a bit... abstract up there actually notions about creating value through a learning process is one that makes sense to people whether you're coming from academic, practitioner or lived experience. OK. I shall stop there. I think the idea is we will be taught later, isn't it?