Dialogic, collaborative approaches to creating and communicating knowledge and practice change have become commonplace in everything from co-creation in community capacity-building, to citizen and patient involvement in health and social care, to dialogic learning in schools, to employee involvement in organizational change, to bottom-up climate change projects, to digital co-design and a whole lot more. 

With their democratic ambitions, transformative power, and (in some contexts) goals of social justice, dialogic, dialogic, collaborative approaches have a lot to offer, especially in these challenging times... But they are also complex and full of tensions linked to power. In the research group in dialogic communication, we have developed a constructive and critical approach to co-creation. It is constructive, in that it revolves around creating spaces for multiple voices, and, in particular, voices that articulate the knowledge of people with lived experiences of the topic under study. It is critical, in that it involves integrating critical analyses about the tensions in co-creation into ongoing collaborative research practices. By continuously making these dual moves, the idea is that we, as researchers, can grapple theoretically, methodologically and ethically with dilemmas arising from the messy complexities of co-creation throughout the research process.

In all our projects, we investigate dialogue and co-creation using dialogic, co-creative and participatory research methodologies, where we create knowledge together with co-researchers with lived experience of the topic under study.

Theoretically and methodologically, we work across dialogic communication theory, participatory research and poststructuralist, feminist and new materialist, posthumanist strands of qualitative inquiry. 

Over the past 15 years, the research group has established itself as a strong, dynamic and internationally recognised research environment in the field of collaborative, co-creative practices. The group has formed the framework for numerous PhD, postdoc and other projects that are co-financed with external national and regional partners. 
                                                                                                                 
Research group leader and contact person: Louise Phillips