PhD Courses in Denmark

Course description

The course is designed for PhD students who are engaged in co-creation in participatory research in any field or topic area across the humanities and social sciences. We understand participatory research as a heterogeneous terrain embracing different kinds of Action. Research and other research currents in which processes of “co-creation” are central. Key principles across the approaches include respect, equity and inclusion, active learning, democratic participation, collective action, making a difference and personal integrity. According to the principles of participatory research, academic researchers and people with personal experience of the topic under study – for example, as health or social service users, community members or professionals – co-create knowledge through dialogue across difference. Often, arts-based research methodologies are used in order to elicit experiential, embodied, affective and aesthetic ways of knowing, in line with the participatory ideal of democratising knowledge production and goals of social transformation and justice. However, co-creation in participatory research is fraught with tensions which arise in the disconnect between the alluring, seductive promise of dialogue with respect to transformative social change and its messy complexities in practice. The course will home in on the tensions and address the following tricky questions:

What does the “co” in “co-creation” consist of in practice? *What is the role of the participatory researcher, and how is control over the research process shared by co-researchers and researchers? How does power come into play in dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in co-creation across different ways of knowing and with what consequences for the co-created knowledge and the scope for action of the different participants?
How can we work in PhD projects with relational ethics of care, theories of co-creation and arts-based participatory methodologies in critical, reflexive ways that attend to these dynamics in the sociopolitical and organisational contexts in which co-creation takes place? How can we integrate analyses of the tensions arising from dynamics of inclusion and exclusion into the research process to generate knowledge about the potentials and challenges of co-creation and as a foundation for a relational research ethics? The aim of the course is to support participants’ PhD projects by presenting critical and constructive approaches to the complexities of co-creation across multiple stakeholders, knowledge forms and knowledge interests. We will bring participatory research into dialogue with poststructuralist, social constructionist and new materialist, posthumanist strands of qualitative inquiry. This will involve exploring ways of working across participatory research, with its critical focus on power in the service of goals of social justice and social change and current seams of qualitative and post-qualitative inquiry, with their new materialist, posthumanist focus on performative world-making and the embodied, creative and playful. Across the course, we will work with the interplay between metatheoretical assumptions, relational ethics, theory, arts-based, creative methodologies and methods, empirical material and practice. Drawing on many years of experience in, and in-depth knowledge of, participatory inquiry, the course teachers will offer many practical examples.

The course will be organised along interactive, dialogic lines as a space for collaborative learning with a combination of teacher presentations, workshops, group discussions of texts and PhD project feedback sessions.