Coproduction lessons

I can't define coproduction. But I think I can spot it. And I think Barod and I have learned a few lessons about 'doing coproduction':

• you can't coproduce unless you can communicate freely
• you can't coproduce unless your shared vision is stronger than your desire for the familiar and personal comfort zone
• you can spot coproduction because anyone in the group can initiate anything (budget decisions, ideas, strategies, projects, parameters for working together, who should be involved), and everyone knows what the budget is
• coproduction isn't the only way to work together. Consultation and representation on boards are still important and valid.  What's vital is that we don't label something as 'coproduction' just because it sounds good or involves some form of working together.

Do those tests work for you when you reflect on your own experiences of coproduction? What would you add? What would you lose?

Putting the pieces together

I tend to take things I do lightly.

That's fine, until the day comes when you need to make a list and then I'm scrabbling to remember what I've done that is relevant.

It's like that with things I write. I make a list. Then I remember I wrote a chapter in a book published by RHP. Oh, and I know I've done articles for magazines. But can I remember which magazines, let alone which issues?

And it's like that with coproduction. It's time for me to make a list of what I've done, and I'm not sure where to start!

I have good reasons for resisting making lists. I hate people showing off what they've done, or treating themselves as more important because they can put more on their cv.

I have bad reasons for resisting making lists. I tend to dismiss anything I can do as being worthless. I fear being judged. I am too chaotic to be systematic about anything - and research relies heavily on being systematic.

Now I have a good reason to make a coproduction list. I'm going to the first meeting of people in South Wales who are interested in research and coproduction. To get and give the most, I need to marshal in my own brain what I've done, what I know, what I think, where I see research and coproduction in the future.

Blogging is one of my ways of thinking out loud and capturing that thinking. So here goes with an attempt to develop a timeline for my relationship with coproduction:

• went to a North Wales Working With Not To meet-up about coproduction and listened to Edgar Cahn
• went to hear Eddie Bartnik at a South Wales Coproduction Wales meet-up
• resisted when people started to call what Barod does 'coproduction' because I disliked the term
• worked out why I disliked how 'coproduction' was being used as a term, and found a way to explain what I want 'coproduction' to mean.
• worked with Constance of Wales Council for Voluntary Action on re-explaining 'coproduction' in terms that made sense to members of the public (Being At the Centre booklet)
• got involved with the ESRC research seminar series about academics, people with learning difficulties and practitioners researching together - and realised that it helped move things forward to combine thinking about inclusive/participatory research with coproduction thinking.
• Barod conceptualised what we mean by 'coproduction' in a slide show and workshop (thanks to Good Practice Exchange for giving us the chance to develop those, and Mel Nind for inviting us to adapt the slides for use in a research context at NRMF 2015)
• had a few exchanges with Professor Tony Bouvaird about coproduction
• kept developing ideas of ways to work together as equals within Barod, and between Barod and other organisations
• Barod explicitly 'did coproduction' with Jim Wright and Torfaen People First. We worked together from November 2016 to March 2017. I'm thinking through sociological stuff from my PhD, to see if I can explain why what we did felt like 'real coproduction'. We are also jointly writing up tips on 'doing coproduction'
• went to the launch for Coproduction Network Wales, and began to think it may be time to dip my toes into the formal side of developing coproduction as a public services practice in Wales.
• met Dr Gideon Calder to talk coproduction and ethics - and now have an invitation to the South Wales meet-up for people sharing an interest in coproduction and research.

Masked by that list is four years of thinking, reflecting, theorising and doing, which in itself draws on 20 years of thinking, reflecting, theorising and doing variations on 'working together' and 'consulting'.

I think it's possible to sum up the key things Barod and I have learned:

• you can't coproduce unless you can communicate freely
• you can't coproduce unless your shared vision is stronger than your desire for the familiar and personal comfort zone
• you can spot coproduction because anyone in the group can initiate anything (budget decisions, ideas, strategies, projects, parameters for working together, who should be involved), and everyone knows what the budget is
• coproduction isn't the only way to work together. Consultation and representation on boards are still important and valid.  What's vital is that we don't label something as 'coproduction' just because it sounds good or involves some form of working together.

And that's why the list is helpful. By putting together the list, it's helped me put the pieces together of what we have learned. And I reckon those four key points were worth the effort of making a list.

Four lives, one body

I envy secret superheros and villains. They only have two lives. You know, the "by day he is..., but by night..."

I have at least four lives, depending on how I think of them.

• Postgraduate student
• Hub at the heart of a family/household
• Community activist
• Worker-director

Oh, make that at least five lives, because sometimes I like to flop in a corner and just be me.

So far, so normal for many older postgrad students. We often blog about balancing and juggling, and avidly read tips on how to prioritise. It's not easy, but we do it.

But I like to push the boundaries a bit further. As part of the richness of being me, I live and work as a committee within my head. This way of being brings immense strengths as long as the committee are able to function as a whole.

Living as a committee is sometimes termed a disorder and can be seen as a stigma. But that implies there's something intrinsically wrong with living this way. It is definitely a different way of living. For example, sometimes I need to switch off from engaging with the people outside my head before answering a particular question because I have to do a quick check of how we all want to answer. But it is also a supremely effective way of thinking and working. How else could I/we bring multiple, overlapping but different, perspectives on whatever I am researching? How else could I/we divide up thinking tasks within my/our head and process multiple strands of thinking at the same time? (That is the coolest aspect of being me, even if it goes with a slight tendency to forget that I only have one body, which brings me back to the importance of "me" time and looking after ourselves...).

It can be time-consuming making sure all is well within, but at least it means I avoid the standard mature postgrad challenge of prioritising "me" time. I know that if I don't, I have about six weeks before anarchy will reign within. Which, ironically, probably makes me less prone to imploding than most multi-tasking postgrad students; I simply don't have the luxury of being able to push so hard that I risk burning myself out. I know where that leads and I/we don't want to go there again.

I pulled this post just before hitting "publish" last week, because I was worried about even this minimal self-disclosure about having a mind that works differently from most peoples. But I've reflected on the risks and decided I'm willing to take them, so here we go.

There's a lot written about the risk of self-disclosure in academic life when your brain is wired differently from what's accepted as "normal". But I don't get it, at least not within a qualitative research world where "normal" is as meaningless as any other statistical term, It seems more of an asset than a problem. If there's one thing that frustrates me, it's not being able to get my head round something, that feeling that I'm missing something obvious.

I'm curious as to what you will make of what I've said - that I'm different, that I hesitated before disclosing it - and that I see it as a "disclosure" rather than casual conversation.

So if anyone feels like satisfying my curiosity, please go ahead :)

The blog about the blog about blogs

The blog about the blog about blogs

I didn't make it to bed until 2am thanks to the timing of Crossfit's (American) announcement of 15.2 at the Crossfit Open. So it took a special kind of tweet to get my bleary-eyed interest before breakfast this morning. In fact, it took @LSEImpactBlog's tweet about Jenny Davis's blog about blogs to make my brain wake up.

Cards on table. I'm writing a blog that Jenny won't quote. I'm an unpublished nobody with random ideas about Einstein's fish, Hindistani elephants, more curiosity than expertise and I use this blog to help me capture thoughts as they fly through my head. I'm not blogging to get well crafted worthy-of-peer-review knowledge 'out there' faster than a peer-reviewed journal process allows. And when I am ready, I will probably bill it as a 'Working Paper'rather than a blog.

But I do hope that Jenny has time to read this. Her blog about blogs has got me thinking about knowledge. In particular, it got me thinking about how I use other people's knowledge.

There are three ways that I'm aware I use other people's knowledge. There are probably more, but that's a whole other (Johari's Window) story. The ways I know I use other people's knowledge are:

• to hide behind their authority or to use their credibility to bolster my own.
• to show the stepping stones that get me from A to B so someone else can follow my thought processes.
• to spark ideas - a kind of dialectic between my thinking and another person's thinking that sharpens, refines, confuses or stimulates my own thoughts.

When I get my first peer reviewed article published, I will be indebted to all three ways of using other people's knowledge.

And here's the rub. Do we give more weight to one of those three uses of people's knowledge over another use? Do we publicly acknowledge one use and not another? Is our choice about prioritising and acknowledging more to do with the other person's contributions to our ideas or the status of the other person? I think that asking ourselves those questions guards us against slopping thinking about how and why we incorporate other people's thinking into our own work.

If we need the other person's status to bolster the status of our own thinking, then of course we will only want to acknowledge the contribution of those with high status. And in an academic peer reviewed journal, it's not hard to guess who has highest status.

But if we take seriously the need to "show our workings" so others can interact more fully with our writings, perhaps we need to become more concerned to acknowledge the thinking that interacted with our thinking, whatever its source.

And if we come from any kind of participatory, democratised, coproduced or post-whatever perspective then perhaps we need to take seriously the ethics of not attributing credit to those who contributed to our thinking.

Coming back to Jenny's blog, I quite see her logic for her choice of which blogs to cite, and her logic for having one rule for her and another for her students. You need to know how to operate within the rules before responsibly breaking the rules. And you need to know how to decide for yourself how to treat any information or knowledge from whatever source. Without well developed critical reading skills, it's really only safe to be spoon-fed via other people critically reviewing everything for you and telling you what is worth reading.

Jenny has made me wonder:

Will I cite blogs in my first peer reviewed paper? I don't know.

Will I incorporate thinking that only came about because of what I've read in blogs? Undoubtedly.

I'm left with a number of questions about how we do/don't attribute (or perhaps even recognise and trace) other people's contributions to our thinking. 

Perhaps more profoundly, it leaves me with the question "Do I value knowledge more for the status of the thinker than the value of their thinking?"

Back to the mundane

I've had to rethink my eating habits over the last year, because I decided I wanted to do whatever it takes so that, if I have a later life, it will be a healthy one. My diet is now built around vegetables and lean protein. I'm healthier, I've lost well over three stone and I'm not obsessing about food (usually...).  I eat anything I want, while keeping in mind both my ultimate goal and my desire for current pleasure.

It strikes me that I need to carry over some of those principles to how I approach research.

Vegetables and lean protein are the mundane building blocks of a health diet. Usually there's nothing exciting about them. But I've grown to love them. I have yet to grow to love the mundane building blocks of healthy research.

For me, research is a lovely mix of high excitement, intellectually stimulating conversations, incredibly hard work, Expressos by the bucket and the mundane. At the moment, my pleasure in research are found in the first three, occasionally fuelled by the fourth.

After a few days of the first three, it's back to the mundane today (suitably fuelled by a triple Expresso for breakfast). And I'm already resenting it and how it is interrupting "the real work" - as evidenced by avoiding the admin in order to write another blog entry.

So, is there a positive spin on the mundane?

Learning to love the mundane

Mundane doesn't mean boring. Mundane doesn't mean unimportant - although I do have to keep reminding myself of that when timesheets get in the way of immersing myself in a creative phase...

• Mundane is a chance to let the back parts of my brain freewheel and process all the excitement, conversations and literature that I've shoved in so far this week.
• Mundane gives a bit of order, a bit of structure particularly when the research process is going through a scatter-gun, creative thinking phase. That's because the mundane means focusing on timesheets (yep, European funding comes with timesheets even if you are a student), budget planning, future time planning, dotting i's and crossing t's for the protocol and paperwork for the ethics committee. It focuses my thinking, forces me to be clear.

In giving the back parts of my brain a chance to freewheel and quietly process new ideas, the mundane makes me less likely to get intellectual indigestion or fry my brain.

In doing my timesheets, budget plans, proof reading, the mundane makes it more likely that I will keep my eyes on the final goal and not get sucked down the rabbit hole or disappear in all directions as I enjoy the excitement of interacting with stimulating people and thoughts.

I guess it took me time to learn to love, plan my meals round and look forward to my vegetables. I stuck with it until I learned to love them by focusing on what kind of later life I want.

Maybe I need to keep that focus with my research. I need to stick with the mundane until I learn to love it (can't imagine that day coming - but then I couldn't imagine the day a plate of steamed kale would fill me with pleasure). I need to remember how the mundane will help me achieve my ultimate goal and be willing to sacrifice a bit of immediate pleasure for that ultimate goal.

And on that note, I'd better get off this blog and start proof reading again.

Why I pulled today's draft blog

I had a lovely blog lined up for today. And then, at the last minute, I pulled it.

I'm ambivalent about whether pulling it was the right thing to do. And I can't quite get my head round my own reasoning for why I pulled it.

I know that the reason is to do with the topic - mental health. And I think a conversation I've just had with a freelancer probably explains my ambivalence about whether or not to publish the blog I had lined  up for today.

I've been doing simultaneous translation from 'policy-conference-speak' into clear English summary. Someone asked me if I did similar work around mental health. Once I'd made a personal reference to mental health, that person then talked about their own experience - which included losing a contract when they had a short illness break related to their mental health. They suspected if they'd lied and said it was really bad flu, then they'd still have the contract.

Yep, that short exchange underlined that, even in circles that talk about equality, personal disclosure is still risky. And it's extra risky via a blog because once it is "out there", you can't take it back or control who can see it.

I can't be doing with stigma, and I find that talking casually, one to one, tends not to be stimatising or uncomfortable at all. I feel that by talking opening and casually, I am helping make a world where mental health loses its stigma. So it seemed natural to carry that into the blogosphere. But....

I think the "to publish or not" comes down to whether the best way to challenge stigma is to hit it head on and hopefully survive, or whether to quietly work away undercover. I have the luxury of being able to choose whether to talk to people about something that could lead to stigma and discrimination, or whether to remain undercover. Others don't have that luxury.

I still don't know whether I will reschedule what would have been today's blog. I still don't know whether my self-disclosure would change anything positively or negatively, either for me or as part of the wider goal of eradicating stigma.

Aaargh!! What kind of world do we live in when what felt like a bit of simple, bloggy, transparency turns into a major, value-laden, stigma-risking dilemma?

The joys of ethics

My "elephant" is a thing called a 'coffee shop conversation'. It's a great public consultation method being developed by Barod. The only problem is that none of us in Barod are quite sure what it is, how to describe it or why it seems to work so well.

I'm planning to climb all over the elephant to get the best idea I can of what it is. But even that isn't going to really work. I need a few more elephant climbers to give their perspective and description of the elephant. That led me to a wierd and wonderful research approach called "collaborative analytic autoethnography". ie, a bunch of us all get introduced to the elephant, look at the elephant individually, then compare notes and see what happens.

I wrote a lovely information pack for "potential research participants" (aka "the rest of the bunch of us").

Challenge 1: our relationship will be both researcher/research participant and coresearchers. The relationship will fluctuate during the time we are working together. That's fun to explain to the ethics committee, but fortunately we have found a way to explain it that is clear and transparent and deals with some of the ethics process issues (like how can you assure anonimity to your research participant when you are going to invite them to coauthor a paper?)

Challenge 2: I have to include lots of information for my potential research participants. So I wrote my lovely information pack, including everything I thought I needed to tell people and everything the university thought I needed to tell people [not always the same]. It went through a few academic checks, and found a wording that should have been fine for the ethics committee. Then I took it to show a potential research participant...

Guess what? The things I wanted to tell people weren't the same as the things people wanted to know.

That shouldn't have surprised me. We in Barod specialise in helping people communicate information to each other, particularly when it's the Establishment wanting to communicate with Jo Bloggs.

But somehow, I'd switched on my "researcher head" and forgotten all that. I just read the ethics handbook, looked at my protocol and plugged away to do what was needed according to the handbook.

So, this afternoon's task is to completely redraft my information pack so I tell people what they want to know before commiting - without leaving out the things I have to tell them even if they think they don't want to know them.

"As an academic, you are known through your writings"

This was one of the many pearls of wisdom offered by Dr Inger Mewburn when she came to Bangor University a few years back to tell us how to write a paper in seven days. Yep, really. A paper in seven days. I haven't got to that stage yet, I'm not even through ethical approval. But her half-day of wisdom has given me the tools I will need when that first paper needs writing. And it has already helped me through the ins and outs of writing a taught Masters dissertation.

It dawned on me, belatedly, that I am using this blog as my first step into being known through my writings. It's a scary thought. In fact it's so scary that I'm tempted to run and hide in the relative anonymity of a postgraduate study room. Why is it so scary? Why don't I want people to know me through my writings?

Maybe it's because I rely so much on watching other people's body language to fine-tune how I communicate with them, and I don't have that luxury when I write. Maybe it's because I still fight insecurity and am scared rigid of being judged. Maybe it's because I have constructed this ridiculous image of The Perfect Academic peering over his or her glasses at me, and I feel like an imposter.

Or, maybe, it's because I don't like fixing anything in stone. I don't like trapping fleeting ideas in cold hard print. I know all too well that tomorrow I will think differently from today, and will express myself differently. But you won't see that. You will only see today's thinking trapped in the blog.

Maybe that's where the blog comes in. Blogging is a way to trap ideas as they pass through, fully or partly formed. There is no pressure to have a conclusion or make a statement. I don't feel the need to impress a peer reviewer and I don't need to comply with what's needed to get published.

So take me as you find me. Or ignore me. Or pull apart what I say. Or be in dialogue with me. Or criticise me. And, perhaps, this way, I will develop the thicker skin and greater self-assurance that I'm going to need for the day I finally tackle that paper in seven days.

How many people does it take to keep a postgraduate on the straight & narrow?

I'm five months into a 12 month postgrad course (MA by Research). The first three months led down a dead end. So now I'm cramming 12 months of work into nine months. And two of those previous months have already been used.

I'm funded by KESS (Knowledge Economy Skills Scholarship). This is a fantastic way to grow individual people's skills within the Convergence area of Wales (ie the poorer parts of Wales), and to grow company's skills as well. Thank you, Europe!

So how many people does it take to keep me on track?

At last count, I had four supervisors, two actively engaged academics on my academic review panel, a husband (who heads research with WCVA; we have unbelievably in depth conversations before we even get to breakfast), a room full of postgraduate students and a few academics on the side who I can email or phone when I need. And then there's the twitter community and the amazing Dr Inger Mewburn who tweets as the Thesis Whisperer (https://twitter.com/thesiswhisperer) for any support that falls between the cracks.

And that's before we start to think about the others who keep me on the straight & narrow. There's my just-teen daughter who pulls me back to earth but also tolerates my irratic working hours. There's the sanity-creating breaks from academia provided by my mates at The Crossfit Place. There's the church and my women's group who are cheering me on even though the research pressure means I've ditched active involvement with them (apart from Sunday mornings, which is part of the support that is keeping me sane).

Coming back to my four supervisors plus two review panel members. It could be hell on earth to have six people all with their own opinions, priorities and research perspectives. But it isn't. It's glorious.

I have two supervisors who know what's needed to get a student through the academic process, who understand policy work and keep me going forward.

I have two review panel members, who are feeding me ideas, reading suggestions and constant encouragement to explore the bigger picture questions - like the wider ethical issues of working with people, the "how do I find a place I can relax & feel at home because the ontology, epistemology, methodology and practicalities are all seamlessly aligned".

All four are there when I need them and fulfil different aspects of the support I need as someone who is an odd combination of insecure, arrogant, dogmatic and open to new ideas.

So where do the two company supervisors fit in? Well, their task is to make sure that whatever I do has real world relevance to them. There is no point in me going down an ontological rabbit hole if there aren't goodies  for the company at the end. I can be as post-structural as I like, as long as  I can explain everything in words of one syllable using only everyday language and concepts.

What more could a postgraduate ask for? I've got the finest of academic minds and the most astute of "real world" minds all working with me to make sure this research succeeds. "Success" means work that has real academic value and real value in spreading ideas, changing attitudes in the big wide world.

I just have to remember there is only one of me, and the clock is ticking. Seven months to go; eeek!

What's with the fish and the elephant?

I'm a sociologist come social activist, not a scientist. So apologies if you wanted a blog about nature. Switch blogs now!

Einstein's fish refers to his principle that you don't judge fishes by their ability to climb trees. It's so obvious when you say it like that. But it is standard practice for most of us in everyday life. We climb trees. We judge others by their ability to climb trees. There's a whole world of normalcy and neurodiversity to explore for anyone who thinks Einstein has a point.

The elephant? It's from a Hindustani story
I could waffle about post-structuralism, fluidity, multiple realities - but it's a lot easier to look at the cartoon on the link. Says it all really - or at least all that's needed to get you thinking.

I'm a few months into postgraduate research, and because I thrive on sharing, talking, listening - and because I tend to work out what I think by writing about it - I've decided it's time to get blogging as I go.

First milestone on Monday - review panel meeting. If I survive that, I may feel ready to blog a bit about what I'm researching, why and how I'm doing it and the joys of ethics.