26.02.13
Professor Neil Ravenscroft and Dr Paul Gilchrist in the School of Environment & Technology, together with Dr Niamh Moore (University of Manchester), Amelia Lee and Claire Holmes (Young Women's Group, Manchester) and Rachel Hanney (Tablehurst Community Farm, East Sussex), have secured a grant from the Arts & Humanities Research Council to develop a new approach to community research.
Their aim is to work as a single team of researchers to model and document experience and learning from the co-design and co-implementation of a transdisciplinary research process that involves a radical reworking of the conventional boundaries between the academy and community partners, and between conventional ideas of specialist and lay knowledges.
Professor Ravenscroft said that "there has been an underlying presumption in academic literature that strong communities represent stable, secure and often relatively isolated environments that act as an 'antidote' or 'refuge' to an ever-more fluid and dynamic social, cultural and globalised world. This is often seen to be particularly strong in 'self-help' communities of interest – such as those who grow food – on the presumption that such activities provide a 'buffer' to the outside word, thus helping these communities to become resilient to external pressure and influence. This understanding of community – based largely on established hierarchical social science research methodologies – has tended to underplay the significance of connectivity between communities, and the many ways in which communities foster social learning environments that underpin this connectivity as part of their own development and renewal. We want to challenge these presumptions by developing a project that is not bounded by academic disciplines or arbitrary ideas about who is a researcher and who is being researched."
The project, which will take place in two phases over the next 16 months, is the culmination of a series of community food projects undertaken by the School of Environment & Technology and funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. The earlier projects, which also involved Professor Andrew Church, have underlined the dynamic nature of contemporary communities and have also explored the ways in which many communities are now researching and documenting their activities as a means of understanding their own development. For Amelia Lee, who has been involved in all the projects, the new grant provides "a really exciting opportunity to develop a deep understanding of contemporary communities and the part that they can play in supporting wider society."
