I rarely research anything without a partner. Often more than one. And this has been the case for a very long time. ( Of course I do occasionally research partner-less, but understand that this is not my preferred way to work.) My research partnerships are long-term and involve much more than doing projects. A couple of partnerships started with a small research project, something that was ‘academic citizenship’ with no external funding involved, and then grew organically after that. (My time of course was covered by my employer.) Other partners have come from conversations with people I got to know over time. Importantly, a few partnerships come directly from my former professional life.

As an ‘applied’ researcher I always find working with partners far more interesting than working solo or working on commissioned projects. Research partners always see things that I don’t, and bring a range of ideas and interpretations that enrich the research process. As well, the partners make sure that the results of the research are much more likely to ‘ring true’ and influence what happens in practice.

There are lots of researchers like me. It is increasingly common for university scholars to work closely with partners who are ‘outside’ the university. Indeed some  research funding schemes promote partnership research that is ‘industry-focused’ where the expectation is that

• The topic to be investigated is a priority for the partner
• There are clear benefits for the partner from the results of the research e.g. the research provides information for policy-making, change initiatives, improved practices etc
• The partner has been involved in the design of the research and has an ongoing role in the research often through a steering committee.

Some funding organisations expect partners to make a financial contribution as well as the usual ‘in kind’ contributions of time and expertise. But not always.

Of course, not all research partnerships are associated with funding schemes. Sometimes partnerships develop because researchers establish relationships with people/organisations with whom they have common interests. Perhaps researchers and potential partners are in the same networks. Perhaps there was originally a fairly conventional researcher-participant relationship which morphed into something much closer through ongoing conversations about and shared activities in the broader area in which the original research was based. Additionally, researching ‘with not on’ can come from efforts to move away from the power relationships that exist in research where the participants are seen only as sources of information. ( It is of course also the case that there are often power imbalances between researchers themselves related to position, gender and geopolitics.)

Researchers concerned with power imbalances want to move towards a more reciprocal relationship with participants. There are strong ethical and social justice reasons for conducting research together – this is particularly the case for research with groups and organisations whose perspectives are under-represented in the literatures. I think here for example of research with children and young people or health care patients whose understandings of their own experiences may differ from that of researchers and the professionals who work with them – you can add others I am sure. And I remember well the ways in which, not too long ago, it was considered novel/radical for researchers to focus on the hidden  ‘voices’ of marginalised groups; many of these concerns and approaches are now considered mainstream. (Well, mainstream in some countries I should perhaps add.)

Whatever example of research partnerships comes to your mind, it is likely that you are thinking of researchers who want to move away from the notion of  an outside-inside divide – a binary which is both methodological and epistemological.

It is pretty easy to locate the big body of methods literatures, across disciplines, where researchers discuss why and how to close the distance between researcher and researched. Many of these literatures anticipate transforming this relationship to become something much more like a partnership.

There is a similarly large corpus about the knowledges question. Changing the relationship between researchers and their partners always involves acknowledging the existence of a hierarchy of knowledge production – researchers are assumed to know about knowledge and how to make it, while partners know about practice. While there is still debate about whether a hierarchy exists – but witness forms of ‘evidence-based’ policy making or practice where practitioners are told to use research to find out what to do and how to do it – many researchers argue that partners are not simply ‘doers’ with experience to contribute to a project. Research partners bring more than experiences, they also have knowledges and skills to contribute to a shared research project. As one of my research partners puts it, provocatively, We are not rats in a cage for you to prod and poke.

Oh and another thing. In practice there are many variations and permutations of partnerships  – partners may for example be participants in the research and also co-investigators and/or people who are co-investigators but not participants. However all permutations of shared research aim to value the knowledges and skills of all participants, as well as their contexts.

Researchers who recognise that their research partners have important knowledges often aim for research that is participatory, or co -constructed. There are extensive literatures about partnerships, and the positionality of researchers and their partners. Anthropologists for example have been discussing the relationship between ‘the researcher’ and the community in which they are based for at least the last fifty years. First Nations peoples have shown researchers that there are multiple ways of knowing, recording and sharing knowledges and these understandings are built into guidelines and formal ethical approval processes in many countries. And researchers who choose establish long-term knowledge-producing relationships with communities – ethnographers and action researchers for example – have written extensively about how to bring different kinds of knowledges and knowledge holders together in ways that are not extractive but beneficial for partners as well as researchers.

Changing the relationship between researchers and their potential partners is not easy. Hence the literatures! It is not really surprising that there are ongoing debates about whether it is even possible/desirable to make partnerships equal and/or equitable. Research journals which canvass research methods often carry papers which discuss the difficulties and benefits of partner research (see for example here,  here,  here and here)  And there are of course a range of books, handbooks and websites on the topic.

I don’t have space here to canvass these literatures but I have provided some links to papers that will allow you to follow up if you are interested. But my concern is more particular.

I often think about an aspect of partnership research which seems to be discussed much less often. Writing with research partners. Writing is one of the points at which research partnerships which have been relatively equitable can become strained. And that’s the focus of the next post. Meanwhile if anyone wants to point me via the comments to examples of how to write with partners I’ll be happy to include them in part two.