This research workshop proposes to draw on the Co-Creation project we have been developing since 2017 and chapters from our book, Co-Creation in Theory and Practice - Exploring Creativity in the Global North and South to share methodological advances and analyze discourses Co-Created with communities using photography, mapping, poetry and street art in various educational settings in the Global North and South. The first half of the workshop will consist of three presentations, the first introducing the Co-Creation method (Horvath and Carpenter, 2020a) and the following two focussed on case-study applications in Mexico (Davies, Osorio-Saez, Sandoval-Hernandez and Horvath, 2020), Brazil (Rodrigues and Horvath, 2020) and England. The second half of the workshop will be a practice-based session.

Presentation 1:

Introduction to the Co-Creation method (Dr Christina Horvath)

Co-creation has become a fuzzy, catch-all term in recent years. We have therefore undertaken to redefine the concept, which we capitalise as ‘Co-Creation’ to distinguish it from concurrent understandings of the term, as a participatory knowledge practice involving artists, researchers, and non-academic communities in the creation of collaboratively produced artefacts and shared understanding. Co-Creation as a hybrid research method responds well to the urgent need to engage civil society groups and communities carrying knowledges related to the epistemologies of the Global South in knowledge production for a better understanding of processes of marginalisation and resistance to exclusion (Santos, 2014). This introductory presentation will first outline a set of ten principles designed to guide the ethos and practical methods of Co-Creation practice. Then the approach’s core objectives will be discussed, including the management of power relations, roles and positionalities of participants, Finally, some challenges of arts-based processes will be examined, in particular their unpredictability, combination with traditional methods and the interpretation of artistic outputs.

Presentation 2:

Capturing the impact of Co-Creation: Co-Creating poetry and street art in Iztapalapa, Mexico City (Jo Davies and Dr Andres Sandoval)

This presentation will discuss an application of the Co-Creation method in Mexico City. A series of poetry and street art workshops were initiated within two secondary schools in Iztapalapa, a marginalised area of the city, by a group of researchers in collaboration with local poets and a local street artist, youth workers from the Mexican Ministry of Culture, and staff from the participating schools. It will discuss the transformative impact of the project in enhancing participants’ perceptions of their wellbeing and potential for effecting change within their schools and wider communities, as well the benefits and limitations of the quasi-experimental mixed-methods research approach used to measure its impact. 

Presentation 3:

The use of graffiti in Co-Creation to facilitate engagement with traumatic past and present (Benjamin Van Praag)

This presentation will explore artist-researcher collaborations in Co-Creation projects through the discussion of two case studies, one within Rio de Janeiro favela, Tabajaras & Cabritos, and another within the city of Bath, England. Tabajaras & Cabritos underwent police pacification in 2010 but has been experiencing ongoing security issues since 2017. The case study explored through Co-Creation methods how street art tours and graffiti painting events in favelas can support neighborhood resilience. In Bath, the project looked at how the suppressed history of trans-Atlantic slavery can be commemorated and made visible in the controlled space of a UNESCO world heritage city.

Practice-based session

The research team will run a taster session of Co-Creation by proposing to engage with a theme relevant to all, educational experiences and wellbeing in the context of Covid-19 restrictions, through a brief exercise of mobility mapping and drawing. The session will end with a chance for attendees to share what they have created before the workshop’s concluding comments.

Co-Creation is a knowledge process that employs creativity through arts-based methods to feed into shared understandings of socially-just neighbourhoods and cities (Carpenter and Horvath, 2018). Co-Creation simultaneously results in tangible material outputs – for instance, artworks and artefacts – and knowledge generated by multiple partners. It draws on many principles of ‘participatory action research’ (Whyte, 1991; Reason, 1994; Greenwood and Levin, 1998), while it also reflects the core foundations of ‘co-operative inquiry’ (Heron, 1996). However, while adopting the guiding principles of these methodologies, Co-Creation takes them one step further, by advocating for systematic collaborations between academic researchers and non-academic partners. These involve three groups in particular. Firstly, groups of local residents who have a stake in the research topic; secondly, stakeholders who are invested in local structures to affect societal change; and thirdly artists whose socially engaged practices contribute to voicing diverse experiences and processes at the local level and to generating understanding around spatial justice and social inclusion (Horvath and Carpenter, 2020a). Co-Creation is a broadly applicable methodology, and through our case study applications we show how it can be combined with other qualitative and even quantitative research methods. The Mexico presentation, which will outline a case study in Iztapalapa (Davies, Osorio-Saez, Sandoval-Hernandez and Horvath, 2020), will focus on the quasi-experimental research design (Campbell and Stanley, 2015) used to assess the project’s impact. Two schools participated in this Co-Creation project, one ‘treatment’ school and the other a ‘control’ school. Before any activities took place, students from both schools answered a questionnaire (Pre-test), adapted from the International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) (2016) questionnaire by the researcher team in collaboration with school staff, who identified the most pressing issues affecting wellbeing in their local schools and communities. Students at the ‘treatment’ school then participated in Co-Creation workshops; three sessions of poetry writing guided by local poets, followed by two graffiti sessions with a local street artist to create a mural outside their school using imagery from their collective and individual poems. The project concluded with the creation of a book of their poems and a public reading outside their school. Students at both schools then answered the questionnaire for a second time (Post-test), enabling differences in responses between the Pre and Post-tests to be analysed by the researchers. Finally, Co-Creation workshops were also initiated in the ‘control’ school to ensure that students there benefitted from the experience too.

The broad scope of areas covered in our Co-Creation book, ranging from community engagement, civil participation and knowledge production to political activism and advocacy, demonstrate very different and sometimes contradictory expectations in relation to the meaning and purpose of Co-Creation. Some of the book’s contributing authors limit Co-Creation’s aims to sparking dialogue between individuals, groups and institutions, building or engaging communities, bringing art closer to the underprivileged, awakening civil imagination, and constructing alternative understandings of neighbourhoods and their challenges. Others go further in their claims for transformative change, suggesting that Co-Creation should seek to advance social justice either indirectly, by disrupting traditional thinking and hierarchies and decolonising knowledge production, or directly, by mediating between communities and power holders, balancing interests, and advocating for alternative visions to be incorporated into future polices supported by the State. These differences raise questions about whether Co-Creation is an actual method or rather an umbrella concept under which very different aims can be brought together and indeed whether it has to fulfil all these aims in every particular case in which it intervenes. The Mexico case study (Davies, Osorio-Saez, Sandoval-Hernandez and Horvath, 2020) further explored the possibility of measuring impact resulting from Co-Creation projects. Beyond the difficulties involved in evidencing and quantifying change in participants’ behaviour, this attempt was also confronted with questions about how to interpret creative outputs such as artworks or artefacts and how to take into account emotions and subjective experiences which are intrinsically linked with the process of knowledge production. Reproduced from the Conclusion chapter of Co-Creation in Theory and Practice - Exploring Creativity in the Global North and South, Horvath and Carpenter (2020b)

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