Introduction

While community oriented studies continue to be a part of the language of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, co-production is now proliferating furiously in research. It has become a new buzz word for a new set of instruments or a new way of working to produce sometimes effective research and sometimes better service quality in the UK and beyond. Co-production of research is believed to offer something different as it provides opportunities for experimenting with ideas from different disciplines to emphasise the dimensions of meaning, discourse and textuality. In other words, it emphasises the ontological work of new categories to be able to explore where knowledge resides, how problems are framed and how research can be mobilised in enacting new realities and research. While a growing body of research of co-production has started to exist between the social sciences, the humanities and the arts practices, they have blurred the boundaries of disciplinary subjectivities. The concept of co-production offers new ways of experimentation, where politics, knowledge, actors and actants are continually in flux. However, there is still a lack of case studies that would open up the field and illustrate in practice what the tensions and challenges of co-production are. This book has offered nuanced critical reflection about those tensions and challenges as well as providing practical examples.

This chapter aims to locate the contribution to this book in relation to process oriented research and its relationship with the impact agenda. It starts with discussing the key contours of the terrain over recent decades. It does so under the theme of co-production of research and the impact agenda. The third section focuses on the process oriented research and draws out three key messages from the chapters comprising this book. First, research on co-production opens up new materialist imaginaries of both concepts through conceptualising local knowledge, analysing impact and its enabling conditions. Second, it advances new theoretical agendas for co-produced research by developing original interfaces between social sciences, arts and humanities. Third, it opens up the multiple temporalities of communities, exploring experimental relationship with links between present, past and future in search of alternative temporalities of representation.