Tending the tensions in co-creation: A critical, reflexive approach to co-creative methods

Across fields of social practice, the harnessing of creativity in collaborative, dialogic processes of knowledge production is championed as a means to empower participants as agents and generate practice change. ‘Collaboration’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘participation’ have become buzzwords with a taken-for-granted positive value. In the panel we de-romanticise “co-creation” and explore how it is enacted in particular organisational contexts, concentrating on context-specific tensions arising in the meeting between different knowledge forms and interests. These include tensions BETWEEN dialogic views of knowledge co-creation as a process of mutual learning to be valued at least as much as the outcome AND the neoliberal instrumentalisation of creativity in the service of social innovation and economic growth. The papers build on the themes of Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research: A Reflexive Approach (Phillips, Kristiansen et al, Routledge, 2012), adopting a critical, reflexive approach that interrogates the tensions AND is committed to developing co-creative methods.