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Learning from ‘failure’ in co-production: Mismatched expectations and power differentials

Aylwyn Walsh photograph speaking at a lecturn

Aylwyn Walsh, Professor of Performance & Social Change in the School of Performance & Cultural Industries, at the University of Leeds

I’m involved in a co-production project as an artist-facilitator and researcher, brought in at the tail end to help create some performance-based interventions as a dissemination and public engagement strategy for a development-related initiative.  The partners have built theatre into the funded work without any discussion, and with many assumptions about the role, scope and scale of willingness to take part.

For what is ostensibly a co-produced initiative, I find myself working on a complex, ever-expanding project because I want to maintain goodwill with a partner on the project. Unlike what has come before, this work requires ongoing, complex discussions with new partners in other countries who have had little chance to shape what they do.

Without mentioning any of the specific details of the project, I will focus on this real example of how co-production partnerships can be initiated with assumptions of mutual respect and enthusiasm for the benefits of co-production. Very soon, however, if projects are not mutually constructed from the beginning, building in time to negotiate expectations, duration and role scope, entrenched hierarchies can emerge, forming unpleasant consequences.

Months into the project, I want to offer a good experience for the partners and participants, but I find myself resentful, confused and not at all sure about why we are doing this. I feel taken for granted, and not only as an individual. As we lurch from chaotic online meeting to sudden requests for reporting, I recognise that my whole discipline and field of work has been misunderstood — tacked on and undervalued — while I am sucked along in tides of expectations in a sea of deadlines.

How partnerships are negotiated and the extent to which power is negotiated:

This anecdote only represents one corner of the project team — which includes other research practitioners based abroad, student theatre makers, scientific research fellows and the largely unseen investigator team from the research project. That said, I am an experienced researcher and practitioner. It would no doubt be harder for less established folks to ask the kinds of questions I outline below once in the thick of things. I am hoping this blog will reveal the wrangling that sometimes occurs when co-production turns into coercion, complicity or simply bad practice.

· Intentions: Does everyone understand why they are involved and what is expected? Have they had the opportunity to revise their part? Is it really co-produced, or is it structured around some other form of participation?

· Reflexive: Can we explore how power and inequity structure the project? How are different people taking part and how is their time, effort, role and work being valued? Are you relying on excessive goodwill?

· Iterative: How can project partners reflect and change tack if they need to, by being able to learn from the process?

I explore some of this in the image below, where I reflect on how values inflect our intention to collaborate in the first place, but that doesn’t always mean that there are shared values (see for instance Walsh & Burnett, 2021a, 2021b, and Walsh et al, 2022).

Diagram - Co-production rooted in activism, cite: Walsh 2023

Image 1: Different elements I take from activist organising to co-production in research

In the second image below, I explore different modes/ intentions of taking part or inviting co-production. I deliberately use terms that include some value statements, because we may assume that our desire to include others is righteous, but our approach (like the project leads in the first anecdote in this blog) may unwittingly entrench attitudes that reveal a lack of consideration. This may be due to time (and often, this is the case, with unforgiving project spending deadlines dictating urgency). But, while I, and many others who have a background in community participatory arts can make wonderful co-produced initiatives with very little resource, it doesn’t mean we should.

Diagram a typology of different values that affect co-production — Cite: Walsh, 2023

Image 2: A typology of different values that affect co-production

The participants in the project — stakeholders with different experience — will not be exposed to the ambivalence I discuss above. They will have a good time, even if it slips into one of the first two categories — participation inflected with ‘good intentions’ and ‘for appearances’ (see Madison, 2007).

In the first story, the failures of the co-production are both in the project design and the process of delivery. It lies in the refusal to negotiate across the power differentials (funders/ partners we want to retain). Most worryingly, is the lack of recognition that we need to negotiate roles, capacity, scope and participation at all.

Navigating power:

By contrast, a project I supported as co-investigator was co-produced with young people in South Africa, remaining untitled until we could workshop the scope and aims of the project with them. We were keen to avoid imposing too much in a top-down way (see Walsh & Burnett, 2021a and 2021b). As a result, we faced a pivot in an intended focus on one subject (anti-fracking) to landlessness and evictions which were more relevant to the community. Our project involved training, sharing skills and having young people film local testimonies about land. The outcomes are that some of these young people continue to make films for local environmental activist movements.

Co-produced work is rarely an unmitigated ‘success’ or outright ‘failure’ (see for instance Jancovich & Stevenson, 2023). What I am pointing out is the need to dedicate time well in advance for project design, and to keep reflecting.

My learning from these projects and my own recent failure to clock the inequity in project design highlights the need for slow, intentional partnership building and consistent communications about what we expect from co-production as core principles next time around.

To cite images, please credit Walsh, A. (2023) Co-production typologies.

References:

Brown, a.m. (2017) Emergent Strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. Chico: AK Press.

Conquergood, D. (2002). Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research. TDR46(2), 145–156. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1146965

Jancovich, L., & Stevenson, D. (2023). Failures in Cultural Participation. London: Springer Nature.

Madison, D. S. (2007). Co-performative witnessing. Cultural Studies21(6), 826–831. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380701478174

Walsh, A., & Burnett, S. (2021a). Voicing ambiguities in the Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba co-creator collective. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 26(4), 605–620. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2021.1888708

Walsh, A. & Burnett, S. (2021b) ‘Seeing power’, co-creation and intersectionality in film-making by Ilizwi Lenyaniso Lomhlaba. Post-conflict Participatory Arts: Socially engaged development, edited by Melis Cin & Faith Mkwanazi. London: Routledge. pp. 33–53, (Walsh & Burnett).

Walsh, A., Olvera-Hernandez, S., Mesa-Jurado, M. A., Borchi, A., Novo, P., Martin-Ortega, J., & Holmes, G. (2022). Valuing trans-disciplinarity: Forum Theatre in Tabasco and Chiapas, Mexico. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 28(2), 311–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2022.2083951

Photograph: Fenia Kotsopoulou

If you would like any further information, please email Aylwyn Walsh a.m.walsh1@leeds.ac.uk.

If you are a member of staff at the University of Leeds and would like to write a blog on your experiences of co-production, please contact lssi@leeds.ac.uk to discuss your idea.  Please join the Co-production Network, which is hosted on the Engaged Research MS Team (University of Leeds staff only).

The Co-production Network has 'moved' onto its own channel within the Engaged Research MS Team.  The purpose of this move is to have a central location for the materials and news about Co-production at The University of Leeds and have a community space where those interested in Co-production can share their experiences or ask colleagues for advice.