The quote used, by Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s Henry The Sixth, Part 2 (Act 4, scene 2) is deployed here to emphasise the contradictory and negative impulses that lurk in the corners of partnership working.  The paper draws on the experience of a collaborative continuing professional development project focused on curriculum design and practitioner enquiry [Northumbria Law EXTRA : Educational Excellence through Teaching and Research in Action].  This project had many of the traditionally-claimed features of collaborative partnerships: an overt and public emphasis on partnership, trust and complementary roles in research undertaken collaboratively by HE researchers across disciplinary contexts  (Black-Hawkins in McLaughlin et al, 2004); thus it represents part of a developing trajectory of a dispersed research-informed practice community (Lieberman and Grolnick, 1996).  It represents the way in which we have always tried to work and a ‘good enough’ practice and relationship (Winnicott, 1964).

And yet.  Partnership working is filled with missed opportunities and disappointments, even (or especially) when it is ‘good enough’. We would position our research under the ‘inclusive’ umbrella (Walmsley and Johnson, 2003) but it appears that in order to do so authentically, we need to identify and explore our murderous impulses.

In part, this paper is therefore an exploration of knowledge brokerage (Meyer, 2010) and is heavily influenced by the following quote that he uses to illustrate the choices that brokers make in their use of knowledge for different audiences:

“To translate is to connect, to displace, to move, to shift from one place, one modality, one form to another while retaining something. Only something. Not everything. While therefore losing something. Betraying whatever is not carried over.”  (Meyer, 2010, p121, quoting Law, 2002, p99)

It is not sufficient for us to describe (as we have done elsewhere: Hall, et al, 2005; Hall, 2009) the ways in which we have negotiated power differences in research networks – as if to exculpate us from having had, or used power at all – it is more important to look at what has been purposefully discarded or carelessly lost and to be curious about our intent.  What has been privileged in the translation of knowledge and why?

While the methodological and quality debates in inclusive research are experiencing a new impetus of interest and scholarship (Nind, et al 2013) the emotional content of partnership working is a relatively under-explored area. There are a number of underlying tensions of partnership working (including but not exclusively): unexpressed resentments about power imbalances; the contradiction of recruiting disparate partners so as to learn something new only to find the partnership working towards homogeneity in its processes; the expectations of particular outcomes from partners and those who make the partnership possible but do not themselves participate.  In this paper we make an honest attempt to look in the dark places as well as to celebrate the sunnier aspects.

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