It has been a year since we launched ‘On the Margins’ network and what a year it has been! Since last November the network has grown significantly and today it boasts a membership of 212 individuals!

Our membership is diverse and includes both academics and non-academics, activists and practitioners representing a range of different groups and organisations. Members come from Scotland/UK as well as from a range of countries around the world.  

The network’s website has also proved popular having attracted nearly 4000 visitors and 11,000 views during the past year.   

From the outset, we started ‘On the Margins’ with the aim of critically exploring some of the key issues in the field of participatory research and co-production. We have explored a range of these issues through various events including webinars, podcasts and workshops. We began the webinar series with a talk by Prof Sarah Banks who has written extensively on the ethical issues involved in participatory research. Sarah focused on various ethical and methodological challenges that have emerged in the context of participatory research moving from the margins to the mainstream. Questions answered in her talk included: ‘Do we need new ethics for these new times? And, as participatory methods become more and more popularised and driven by ‘impact’ agendas, how do we deal with the problem of co-production becoming diluted and co-opted?’ 

The next webinar by Prof John McKendrick turned attention to the theme of ‘participation’. The talk focused specifically on the involvement of ‘experts by experience’ in the co-production of policy and service development within a Scottish context. In his talk John asked what is the most optimal way to embed ‘people with lived experiences’ in co-production, arguing that this isn’t about merely ‘bringing people together’ but rather making sure that their experiences and priorities are taken seriously and become the centre of collaboration.   

Another aim of our network that we set out from the start was to be an inclusive and empowering forum, inviting both academics and activists to engage with issues concerning co-production in in an engaging and equal way. It was in this spirit that the invited speaker of our most recent webinar was the curator and anti-racist activist Zandra Yeaman who reflected on her experiences of leading the collaborative project: Curating Discomfort. Zandra’s talk offered a critical and practitioners’ perspective on the issue of participatory practice and co-production. In particular she outlined the Participatory Framework that she and her colleagues have developed as part of the ‘Curating Discomfort’ project, a framework which brings so much clarity to the question: ‘What does equitable collaboration look like in practice?’  

In March last year, we launched our new podcast series called ‘The art of doing collaborative research’. While the webinars focused on thematic issues concerning co-production, we wanted the podcast to be about the practice of participatory research. What does it meant to do co-production in practice? Is there an art to it and what would it look like? With this in mind, we started the first podcast discussing  a collaborative project between Edinburgh Napier University and ⁠Migrants Organising for Rights and Empowerment⁠ (MORE), a grassroots organisation based in Glasgow advocating for human rights and dignity for asylum seekers and refugees living in Glasgow. The first episode focused on how this collaboration was built in practice, discussing some of the key challenges of doing participatory research with the asylum seeking community in Glasgow.  

Continuing in the spirit of inclusivity, the June podcast invited  Tominke Olaniyan, a practitioner who is Director of PADEAP (Pan African Development Education and Advocacy Programme, and Dr Craig Walker, research associate The Open University, to talk about their collaborative and international project  Decolonising Education for Peace in Africa (DEPA). As well as discussing arts based participatory methods used with displaced and marginalised communities in different countries across Africa, the podcast also asked what decolonising participatory research looks likes in practice both within and beyond academia.  

The latest podcast turned its attention to a different environment; doing participatory research in prison. We were joined by Matt Maycock who is Senior Lecturer of Criminology at Monash University in Australia. Participatory research is often described as ‘messy’ and complex even in ‘normal’ research contexts; how does one conduct co-produced research in prison given the restricted conditions and an acute lack of agency amongst the participants? What would ‘participation’ look like in a prison context? These were some of the fascinating questions that Matt engaged with in this latest episode of our podcast series.  

Hope the above has given a brief summary and a general idea of some of the events that we have organized and some of the issues that we have grappled with in the past year. We will continue these conversations and explore new issues in the coming weeks and months. For example, our next webinar deals with the very idea of ‘research’ itself. How is research seen and valued from the perspective of particpants and those on the margins?  Looking further ahead, in January we will be organising an international seminar looking to explore how co-production varies across cultural contexts.  

Thank you for being part of our network and for joining our journey so far!   

‘On the Margins’ team.