PhD Courses in Denmark

Course description

The course is designed for PhD students who are engaged in co-creation in participatory research at any stage of the PhD process and in any field or topic area in the humanities and social sciences, such as health and social care; arts, health and well-being; community development; diversity and migration; degrowth, climate change and green transition;politics and activism; organisational development; and digital communication. 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.

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, professionals or employees – co-create knowledge through dialogue across difference. Often, collaborative arts-based and narrative 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 aim of the course is to support participants’ PhD projects by creating a space for joint reflection on constructive and critical approaches to the complexities of co-creation across multiple stakeholders, knowledge forms and knowledge interests. We will home in on the tensions and address the following tricky questions in ways that directly engage with the participants’ PhD projects:

• 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 is power in 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 collaborative arts-based and narrative methodologies in critical, reflexive ways that attend to power dynamics in the sociopolitical and organisational contexts in which co-creation takes place?

Across the course, we will work with an interplay between metatheoretical assumptions, relational ethics, theory, collaborative methodologies, empirical material and practice. 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.

The course will be based on a combination of workshops (consisting of a mix of teacher presentations and group work) and PhD project feedback sessions (in 3 feedback groups, each facilitated by one of the course teachers). The course format itself will enact co-creation by creating spaces for dialogic, mutual learning among participants and teachers about how to tackle the dilemmas and challenges that emerge from the tensions inherent in co-creation in the participants’ PhD projects