32nd IHSRC – symposium submission	

	
Title of symposium: Tending the tensions in co-creation: A critical, reflexive approach to co-creative methods      	

Presenter/author: Louise Phillips	

	

Organisation: Roskilde University	

Title/position:Professor of Communication

Postal Address:Building 43.3, Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies, Postbox 260, Roskilde University, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark

E-mail:louisep@ruc.dk

Symposium presentation (150 words max):Across fields of social practice, the harnessing of creativity in collaborative, dialogic processes of knowledge production is championed as a means to empower participants as agents and generate practice change. ‘Collaboration’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘participation’ have become buzzwords with a taken-for-granted positive value. In the panel we de-romanticise “co-creation” and explore how it is enacted in particular organisational contexts, concentrating on context-specific tensions arising in the meeting between different knowledge forms and interests. These include tensions BETWEEN dialogic views of knowledge co-creation as a process of mutual learning to be valued at least as much as the outcome AND the neoliberal instrumentalisation of creativity in the service of social innovation and economic growth. The papers build on the themes of Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research: A Reflexive Approach (Phillips, Kristiansen et al, Routledge, 2012), adopting a critical, reflexive approach that interrogates the tensions AND is committed to developing co-creative methods.          

Abstracts (150 words max):
Title #1: With eyes wide open - the facilitator at the centre
Co-authors Name: Assistant professor Lisbeth Frølunde, Roskilde University, Denmark
Associate professor Christina Hee Pedersen, Roskilde University, Denmark.     
Abstract: This paper highlights different forms of tension involved in facilitating creative processes and argues that tension is a necessity for change and that vulnerability and discomfort are often overlooked as transformative forces. The analysis draws on data from a classroom context in which university students tested methods for facilitating creative thinking in a course on data production and creativity. The data stem from a session on the method “Lego Serious Play”. One of the authors was present as facilitator, the other as teacher/observer.  Among the tensions analysed are tensions between our own planning and improvisation in the classroom context, tensions produced by different social positions (of student / teacher) and tensions involved in constructions of group identity when an external facilitator disrupts a context. We argue that the facilitation of creative methods calls for keeping our eyes wide open for tensions, for they are the mulch that improves the soil.

Title #2:Working with simulated forms of interaction in health care education-
	A creative approach to facilitate embodied and situated communication skills     
Co-authors Name: Associate Professor Helle Merete Nordentoft, Aarhus University, Denmark
Associate Professor Birgitte Ravn Olesen, Roskilde University, Denmark     
Abstract: This paper argues that role-play as a simulated form of interaction - live and performed on video - is a creative method which has the potential to generate and support authentic dialogues in practice. In the paper we draw on experiences from 6 interdisciplinary workshops at a Danish hospital in which role-play of practice situations - both live and performed on video - formed the launching-pad for participants’ oral and written reflections. Our findings show that role-play has the potential to 1) develop professionals’ sensitivity to the significance of unexpected, embodied and emotional aspects of health care practices and 2) to display tensions between participants’ different perspectives on the same situation. We conclude that the dialogical process of raising reflexive awareness of tensions makes role-play a powerful creative method in health care education.          

Title #3: What's in the "co"? Confronting the challenges of co-creative inquiry in social work education 
Co-authors Name: Associate Professor Ksenija Napan, UNITEC, New Zealand and Professor Louise Phillips, Roskilde University
Abstract: The topic of this paper is a method labelled "academic co-creative inquiry” developed for use in social work education by Napan (2009) with inspiration from co-operative inquiry. The data stem from a course for final year social work students in New Zealand taught by Napan with another teacher and attended by Phillips as observer. Designed to empower students as co-producers of the course, central aspects of the course content and form are open to negotiation by students across multiple knowledge forms including experiential and indigenous knowledges. At the same time, there are a number of non-negotiables defined by the teacher. Relations between negotiables and non-negotiables will be analysed in terms of tensions between bottom-up and top-down dynamics.  Other tensions to be analysed emanate from the wider organisational context which is infused with neoliberal discourse that commodifies education, instrumentalises collaboration in the service of the knowledge economy and stresses individual accountability.          

Title #4: Unfolding of context and contexting in a team
Co-authors Name: Associate Professor Marianne Kristiansen, Associate Professor Jørgen Bloch-Poulsen, Aalborg University 
Abstract: This paper unfolds the social and organizational tensions of working with the co-determination of goals and co-design of processes in dialogues with a team of teachers at a Danish Social and Health School. The teachers decided to inquire into a tension between feeling isolated and connected as teachers. The paper describes the development of an emergent approach from teacher observation of tensions (by using a teacher-made observation scheme), to sharing observations in the team, to a team seminar on education goals, to conversations with management etc. This approach unfolded social tensions within the team between old and new teachers and organizational tensions dealing with working in a team or in a department etc. The paper discusses if and to what extent it is possible to build bridges across these tensions by reflecting on how they are contexted in the dialogues. 

Title #5: Working creatively with reflexive strategies for co-creation in collaborative research: ‘On the Cards’ dialogue forum
Co-authors Name: Assistant Professor Lisbeth Frølunde, Associate Professor Birgitte Ravn Olesen, Associate Professor Christina Hee Pedersen and Professor Louise Phillips, Roskilde University      
Abstract: This presentation will be organised as a dialogue forum for working co-creatively with critical, reflexive strategies for understanding, analysing and dealing with the challenges faced in collaborative research whereby university researchers and social actors in the field under study co-produce knowledge. In the forum, we will use a creative method based on cards with questions relating to 3 types of challenges:  1) challenges relating to the specific ways in which “dialogue” and “participation” are enacted in collaborative research practices; 2) challenges relating to the ethics of researcher-participant relations and 3) epistemological challenges relating to the status of co-created knowledge. The assumption is that we, as researchers, can best deal with the tensions of collaborative research through reflexive, complexity- and context-sensitive analyses of how they are played out in research practices. Accordingly, the dialogue forum will anchor discussion of methodological, epistemological and ethical challenges in experiential accounts of concrete research practices.     

	

Please submit this form as word-document to ihsrc-abstracts@hum.aau.dk