New event: Reimagining Research

In recent years, a number of initiatives have created opportunities for communities to initiate, design and lead research. With increasing impact, different models of community-led research are enabling communities to grow society’s understanding of inequalities and longstanding social challenges. As this movement gathers momentum, new support structures are helping to share this research with and beyond established academic research processes, growing our collective understanding of local and societal challenges and creating new visions for the future.

This sharing event will bring together some of the people forging these new paths together with an audience of community champions, activists, academics and policy makers to think together about how community research can grow, and how these new ways of working can create effective collaboration with more established models of research to build collective solutions to longstanding challenges.

The event will include provocations from those working in and with communities as well as opportunities for those attending to share their ideas. It is a collaboration between The British Science Association, the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) and The Young Foundation and will include:

• Projects from The Ideas Fund who are demonstrating co-creating and re-imagining new power relationships between community and academia

• Researchers in the Community Research Networks programme taking fresh approaches to understanding community challenges.

• The NCCPE will share insights arising from their Engaged Futures programme, a movement building programme to imagine visions for how universities engage with society in the future, and work together to realise them.

The event will consist of an hour long (12.30-1.30) interactive workshop with guest speakers from the field of community research followed by an optional 30 minute facilitated networking opportunity. We hope people will be able to join for the full 90 minutes (until 2pm) but it is possible to come just for the first hour. We will compile a list of resources and sharing materials through the event and aim to build a mailing list of interested participants.

The organisers hope that the event will prompt new collaborations and ways of bringing together conversations around this theme. It aims not to be a one off sharing event but the first of a new set of collaborative encounters with people who share a vision for a more community-centred approach to researching our shared future.