What does excellence look like in co-produced research? Reflections from the Brigstow Institute
A core part of Brigstow’s work has always been to question who, and what universities are for. More importantly, what value they bring to society. In the past few years, Brigstow has identified these questions of value appearing increasingly in the wider context of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), sometimes for the wrong reasons.
Current discourse surrounding the future of universities points toward an institution in ruin. Dwindling funding, ‘audit culture’, extensive restructurings and associated redundancies, and losses of entire departments have constructed an environment for our research community/s that feels hyper individualised, marketised and polarised. Within universities academic and professional services staff feel the need to succinctly explain what value they bring to both the organisation and society in quite prescriptive ways.
This blog post comes at a time of Brigstow’s own restructuring. As we take stock, we want to better understand and articulate what value we bring to the research community, not just locally, but internationally. Finding the right way of measuring this value feels difficult within current systems like the Research Excellence Framework which focuses largely on quantitative metrics and ask academics to neatly organise their impacts and outputs into single disciplines.
This works at odds with Brigstow’s approach. We fund widely impactful research that sits across multiple disciplines through a series of dynamic and responsive initiatives and themes. The nature of our work reflects the diversity of research approaches and encourages radical interdisciplinarity. Through training and intellectual leadership in co-produced methods we support our research community/s to create change both internally and externally. Most of the research we fund is focused on social justice and structural inequalities which critiques meritocracies and economic growth at the expense of human and environmental wellbeing.
Fundamentally we and our research community predominantly use qualitative approaches to research, so we question why are we measuring the quality, impact, and ultimate value of that research to society in a quantitative way?
In response to this, we wanted to experiment with reframing our approach to quantifying the success of research, and trial one that focuses less on the product at the end. A framework that recognises diversity within research and so provides a range of ways of measuring value.
In my research as a PhD student in the Business School, I am exploring alternative forms of organising and post-capitalist theories to research culture, so it was hard not to pull on them in my role at the Brigstow Institute. This literature foregrounds principles and embodied ethics as an invitation to move away from capital-focused measures of value.
To give some examples, we explored an eco-feminist approach that recognises the patriarchal and oppressive nature of our current economy and encourages the reader to embrace a feminist ethic of care in the way we organise markets (Crittenden, 2000). We also found the principles of Degrowth (D’allis, 2015; Kallis, 2018; Stuart, 2020) and Doughnut Economics (Raworth, 2017) helpful as an invitation to imagine a shift from growth-based model of production and consumption and reframe the focus of society to care, localism and living within Earth’s means. Finally, the Diverse Economies (Gibson Graham 1996; 2006) provided us with inspiration for a robust framework of inventorying resources that exist in the community beyond financial capital.
Adopting this literature, over the past year the Brigstow team and I have been thinking a lot about what a system or framework for measurement based on such principles might look like. More importantly, how we might use these principles as a benchmark or framework to measure the value, success and impact we have on research culture in the institution. Keeping us accountable and ensuring our research community is a healthy, thriving and productive one.
We started this process by thinking about our beliefs, mapping out why we do the work we do. Many of these focused on providing a safe and secure environment within the research landscape for academics, creative and community collaborators to explore the research projects that some other funders might deem ‘too risky’. We are governed by values of care, kindness, and experimentation. We are helpful, hopeful, approachable, and accepting. We believe in radical democracy and research approaches rooted in co-design. We understand that normative ways of doing research can often have detrimental and extractive impacts on the communities we work with.
What we finally developed were five core guiding principles for people to collectively gather around. Principles that we hope will now shape and direct us in the decisions we make, and the types of research community we continue to grow. These principles are:
Safety: Brigstow is concerned with creating a safety net for our collaborators and research community. We are a secure space for co-produced research to thrive. This principle has two key functions. The first is that we often fund projects that are deemed too ‘left field’ or risky by other funders. We see potential in research that has no defined disciplinary home and tests the boundaries of conventional academic practice. Likewise, we provide money for exploratory ideas that might not materialise as full scale projects but need to be tested to understand that. The second meaning of this principle comes from recognising the difficulties that many external partners have in engaging with university processes. Brigstow aims to take on the administrative burden for those attempting to engage from an external position. Supporting them to navigate and understand the often-convoluted bureaucratic processes.
Intellectual Democracy: Equity of voice and knowledge in the research process is central to our work. The proliferation of research practices of co-design has meant that often participatory and co-produced methods can be co-opted into other agendas that contradict the equitable nature of these approaches and appear tokenistic to partners from outside of the university. We want to move beyond models of co-production that use external knowledge and voices as a consultation or translatory process at the end of research. Instead, we push forward a model of co-produced research that involves those outsides of academia at all stages of the research process, working together in a way that works best for everyone and that values all forms of knowledge production in the team.
Creativity: We see the importance of creativity and creative practices embedded within the research process, not just in the final stages of the research cycle as a way to communicate findings, or to facilitate difficult topics. As such, we support research that embeds creative practices throughout the research lifecycle and considers the contributions that are made to those creative practices as well as to the project.
Radical interdisciplinarity: The word polycrisis has become embedded in our everyday lexicon. Often the causes of structural inequalities are a complex mix of intersecting social phenomena. So, we argue that no one single approach is sufficient to understand and overcome the major issues facing society. We want to focus on building an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary research community that connects not just through multiple academic disciplines but disciplines from beyond academia as well.
Plurality: Related to the previous principle, we don’t just need different disciplines and practices approaching the same question; we also need different questions being asked of the same phenomena. Rather than focusing on universal approaches, we should break open the possibilities of where social change might come from.
Over the next few months, we’ll be exploring some of this approach in more detail and want to build a community around this approach. We want to create worked examples of how prinicples might work in practice. We’ve already used them to reshape our funding processes and restructure the style of support we provide for our community and networks, but we want to take it beyond our team.
We want to plant a seed and see how people responded to this principled approach to judging quality. What might this look like within your university or research organisation? Funding body? Or cultural organisation? How could we operationalise such a pluralistic approach to measuring research impact that works for the entirety of the research community? Please do share your thoughts with us at hello-brigstow@bristol.ac.uk.