Connected Communities

Ways of Knowing: Exploring the

different registers, values and
subjectivities of collaborative research
Helen Graham (University of Leeds), Sarah Banks (Durham University), Michelle Bastian (University of
Manchester), Catherine Durose (University of Birmingham), Katie Hill (Sheffield Hallam University), Tessa
Holland (West End Housing Co-op), Ann McNulty (HAREF: Health and Race Equality Forum), Niamh Moore
((University of Manchester), Kate Pahl (University of Sheffield), Steve Pool (Poly-Technic, artist) and Johan
Siebers (University of Central Lancashire)

WAYS OF KNOWING

Ways of Knowing: Exploring the different

registers, values and subjectivities of
collaborative research
Executive Summary and Introduction
Accounts of the real world do not, then, depend on the logic of discovery but on a
power-charged social relation of conversation (Haraway 1998, p. 593)

Ways of Knowing was a follow up project developed from discussions which took place at
the AHRC Connected Communities Summit in 2012. Everyone involved in Ways of
Knowing had already been involved in other Connected Communities projects and had
substantial collective experience of hosting, facilitating and attending participatory and
collaborative events, workshops or meetings. We used Ways of Knowing as a reflective
space where we might come together to experiment with the ways we structure
collaboration and to understand better the kinds of research and knowledge made
possible by different methods of staging collaboration.

We sought to address the epistemic questions raised by collaborative research, methods,
outcomes and impacts by self-consciously deploying the different approaches members of
the team had used within our previous collaborative research practice. We did this through
trying out a wide range of methods from design, arts practice and storytelling to a
Consensus Workshop and Socratic Dialogue.

At the heart of collaborative methods lie different ways of imagining and bringing into
relationship the individual and collective. What we offer here is an account of how different
approaches we explored configured and imagined individual, collectivity, knowing and
change. Through this we suggest ways in which those interested in collaboration might
self-consciously draw on a repertoire of approaches, figurations and ways of being together
in their research, teaching, work or activism.

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Key words
Participatory research, epistemology, ontology, workshop, knowledge, collaboration,
methodology

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What we did
knowledging. A verb (Steve Pool, Workshop 1)
The method Ways of Knowing used was for each of the research team to experiment with
approaches to collaboration used in previous Connected Communities projects. In this section the
range of approaches used in Ways of Knowing are introduced through the reflections of the
different facilitator as well as through photography and extracts from the project Zine (a Do-ItYourself magazine) we produced at the end of the project.
Steve Pool: Taxonomies (Workshop 1)
Three rings of rope. Lots of different stuff. Silently work together to move things into categories. You
can disagree.
I like the taxonomy activity as I made it up myself rather than borrowing it from a theatre
person or the internet. [] It worked as the real point is that there are many correct answers
and people can agree a thing without speaking it. [] The taxonomy game worked well but
there was too much consensus for me really and not enough shifting about.[] Men often
(not always) are more uptight about what goes in which taxonomy. I put the magnet in the
box of objects to bring because once I had a massive silent argument about whether ferrous
and non-ferrous metals could go in different sections (Steve Pool, 30th May 2013)

1)

2)

1) A silent argument is brewing. Grouping objects as part of the Taxonomies workshop led by Steve
Pool. 2) One of the group reflecting on stepping back from the Taxonomies task.
Steve Pool: Storytelling (Workshop 1)
Big piece of paper. Pens are passed around. Tell a story.

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Our story was disconnected it did not flow, we did not connect. We sort of used the story to
introduce ourselves but kept a lot back. We had no narrative and not much imagination. We
were situated and we did not feel playful. Towards the end of the two days we had moved
on. Did we start to build a new story? I don't think so, not yet but perhaps we are starting
it now (Steve Pool, 30th May 2013).
Kate Pahl and Steve Pool: Should we play the film?
Openly share a dilemma. Discuss it. Ask others to join in.

'There is something about working through a problem that is important for both of us,
rather than pushing things under the carpet. It was a genuine disagreement that we aired at
the Ways of Knowing workshop but it was good as we ended up writing a book chapter
about it (Kate Pahl, 2nd December 2014)
I do the same thing with other people I collaborate with too. It does work as a way to open
up a conversation and say its ok to disagree. The Ways of Knowing example was a bit of an
extreme version - the disagreement was long running and real and although it wasn't
planned or mannered, it was built on learnt practice and on the confidence in that our
working relationship could handle open debate (Steve Pool, 2nd December 2014).
Katie Hill: Making as Method (Workshop 1)
A space. A table. Lots of different materials. Make a tool to help you with your Connected
Communities projects.

Whilst people were making things conversation had its ebbs and its flows, sometimes it
went quiet and there were different conversations happening around the room. The
experience of people explaining what they had made was pleasant (for me), and lively,
especially the demonstrations of things to be worn or used which is the nice thing about
tools, theyre not just for looking at. The messy materials were crammed back into the Bag
of Craft but some stayed out and some bits of making crept into the rest of the day in the
form of knitting which incorporated any knittable material that as available into
polythreaded collaborative multidirectional piece of knit (Katie Hill, 10th January 2014)

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Katie Hill ran a version of the Making as Methods workshop at the Connected Communities
Networking Day in Edinburgh, July 2013
Niamh Moore: Consensus Workshop (Workshop 1)
Set a question. On your own make a list of your thoughts. Then share in pairs. Write your clearest
ideas on pieces of paper. Then work together to cluster and name the clusters.

I used an approach that I have learned from working with community groups, from seeing it
in action, and then from going and doing a two day training course. And in a project called
Ways of Knowing this detail is not unimportant, that I have learned from community
partners, and their Ways of Knowing. When, in my involvement with the Young Womens
Group, I saw the consensus workshop in action, I was so impressed by this simple but yet
magical approach, of leading participants through a process to build a collective decision by
the end.
In retrospect I wish Id said more about consensus in terms of setting the scene. Like any
method there are crucial prerequisites, like that the group is committed to consensus. For
me consensus is not some way of flattening out conflict, but rather a process for working
through and building a collective position together. It is about the commitment to the group.
The opposite of consensus is not conflict, or dissensus, rather consensus might better be
understood as a way of working through different perspectives and ideas together, as a
response to the tyranny of structurelessness (Freeman 1971) (Niamh Moore, 9th January
2014)

The process of starting to cluster ideas and submissions which disrupt the process of ideas, words
and group as part of the Consensus Workshop.
Catherine Durose and Ann McNulty: Thinking about impact (Workshop 1)
In small groups. Discuss four themes: 1) ensuring community voices are taken
seriously/legitimized; 2) closing the gap between university and community settings/spaces; 3) ways
of mobilising knowledge/evidence/research for policy/commissioning/service
development/governance and 4) ways of communicating across and beyond academic boundaries.
Think about action: where, with whom and for what?

Have been obsessed with ethics and developing the concept of ethical work so hadnt really

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been thinking about knowledge and what it is. We need to look at that very carefully. How
do we communicate between different cultures and religions. Its reopened that kind of
puzzle for me. How do we get people to see knowledge as a process? (Ann McNulty, 20th
June 2013)

Tessa Holland: Wire Work (Workshop 2)
Choose an animal. Take a pen and, without once lifting it from the paper, draw how you might
use the wire to create all necessary parts of their creature. Then chose a piece of wire to be
manipulated in any desired way using hands and /or tools (provided or improvised). The wire is a
very forgiving medium in that there cannot be mistakes, any thing can be undone and remodelled
if desired. There is no right or wrong, only choices.

Making. At the start there was a lot of trepidation and out of comfort zone remarks,
but a range of approaches emerged:

complete silent absorption

dipping in and out of conversation (several remarked to the effect that it was hard to
concentrate and talk at the same time, but they felt they had permission to duck out of
talking)
at times especially at the beginning treating the wire as something incidental to be
doing with the hands whilst talking about other (more important?) things
confidently setting to work in a playful and improvisatory way, giving the creatures life /
animation by collaboratively making interactions, modifying the material (e.g. stripping
wire), creating a story and commenting on the emotional response to the material
interactions (e.g. snake on eating hedgehog and starfish) (Tessa Holland, 19th September
2013)

Concentrating on making a wire animal, based on line drawings done to help imagine the process.
Sarah Banks: Socratic Dialogue (Workshop 2)
Socratic Dialogue is a means of exploring complex philosophical or mathematical questions with a
group of people. It is a method by which a group works together with a facilitator to find an answer
to a well-formed question (such as: What is justice? or When is it right to lie?). The procedure

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involves collecting concrete examples relevant to the question from the participants, choosing one
example to work on, exploring the chosen example, articulating its core statement and agreeing on
principles in answer to the general question.

Reflecting afterwards, I recognise that not only was I working with a highly educated and
thoughtful group of people, but also, of course, I am myself an academic social scientist and
my interest is in exploring issues/concepts from a range of perspectives discovering and
revelling in the complexity. Theres a resistance in me even to attempt to reach a consensus
answer to a philosophical question. With this question, and this amount of time, all we
could do was explore the complexities. The group did do this very well together,
collaboratively. And that, in essence, is what I find so valuable and exciting about Socratic
Dialogue: the learning from each other, the sharing of different perspectives and the
struggle to make sense of complexity (Sarah Banks, 25th September 2013).

From the Ways of Knowing Zine. One of the group wrote out notes they had taken during the
Socratic Dialogue.
Michelle Bastian: Open Space (Open Workshop, January 2014)
There is no initial agenda. The meeting is opened by the facilitator. Everyone is invited to come up
with topics there would like to discuss. They write this on a piece of paper so it can be seen by
everyone. The personal suggesting the topics hosts the discussion. Others can join and move on as
they like (the law of two feet).

Heterogeneous community and difference in togetherness. Thats what I really like about
Open Space. You become much more attuned to a different rhythm and a different kind of
time. You dont keep forcing yourself to keep going to things because its the next thing on
the schedule. It is very individualistic but also you feel really connected to people. If you dip
out, then the aim is that you dont feel defiant, you feel like you [dip out] with everyones
blessing because in Open Space we all want everyone to look after themselves so they can
be in the discussion when they are in the discussions. The Zining and the Open Space
worked well. Even though we had lots of difficulties during the day, by the time we got to

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the Open Space it seemed like people had found their right spots. (Michelle Bastian, July
2014)
All: Making a Zine (Workshop 3 and Open Workshop, January 2014)
Use all the materials we produced from the workshops. Sort through. Add more. Talk and make. Let
the Zine grow.

Making a Zine, we hoped, might enable our different ways of thinking and sharing to be
held together without any resolution, where no-one has the final word and our ideas
and our experiences accrete meaning through their working and reworking as text,

image, drawing or graffiti. Also, and not for nothing given our focus, everyone involved
has very busy lives. Pressures of being freelance, working in community-based
organisations, activism, teaching and/or running lots of other research projects meant
we also needed a collaborative format which valued what was contributed during the
project. This is not only pragmatic or about letting us of the hook of the hard work of
building one authorial voice, it is in recognition that Ways of Knowing is precisely what
came from these processes as-we-went-along. (Helen Graham, 8th January 2014)

An image collaged together by Tessa Holland using drawings produced by the group during the Zine
workshop.

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Key ideas
Four key and highly contested ideas form the conceptual web within which collaborative
research is caught: individual, collective, knowledge and change. Each of the methods we used
deployed understandings of these four terms in quite different ways and show themselves, not as
dogmatic positions, but potentially as a repertoire of approaches; a repertoire on which we might
self-consciously draw (Haraway 1998; Reason and Heron 2001).
Some of the ways in which these terms are contested and evoke different histories, traditions
and practices:

Individual: rational, disciplined, coherent, intentional, contingent, distributed, fluid

Collective: fixed, central unit of legitimacy, people you stick with, seeking consensus,
open, shifting, always being formed and reform, seeking affinity

Knowledge: cognitive, objective, concrete, can be circulated, situated, embodied,
existing through being, social, adaptive

Change: contesting institutional power, mass movements, revolution, persuading
decision makers, taking part in democratic process, collective/direct decision
making, personal growth, living together, creating alternatives now


From our thinking some themes and learning emerged. Here we pick five of the methods and draw
out how they differently deploy ideas of individual, collective, knowledge and change and
what this made possible.
Individual Subjectivities: Feeling, thinking, playing, committed

Katie Hills illustration of the Ways of Knowing project for the front cover of our Zine.

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The different approaches demonstrated just how embodied and lived thinking is. We were not the
ideal rational, disciplined bodied and minds. Personalities intervened and emotions circulated.
People dipped in and out. Or rebelled. Or developed private jokes. Or looked up the M&S opening
times on their phone. Or tried really, really hard. Or pulled away and withdrew. These flows are like
dials of affect in Lawrence Grossbergs sense where affect is not what matters but how and how
much? (1992, p. 82)
Below the approaches are mapped, along with the ways of being and ways of contributing imagined
by the tasks and then what you could do if you werent enjoying it, something which most members
of the group felt with one approach or another. This sense of how to not take part is crucial in the
politics of collectivity; how do approaches enable disagreement, expression of discomfort and exit?
Approach

The imagined way of being

Taxonomies

Active, opinionated, invested.

Making as Method

Hands on, playful, interested in

process rather than the perfect
output, alive to metaphor,
enjoyment of quiet conversation.
Committed to collectivity,
committed to words, listening
and working together, belief in
process to pave way for decision
or action.
Focused, concentrated, quiet,
companionable (almost) silence,
interested in trying hard with the
process and to develop skill in use
of the materials to create
resonant and meaningful
outcome.
Committed to group and to the
process. Believe process will lead
to insight. Disciplined behaviour.
Prepared to see the value explicit
and agreed rules. Challenging the
process is built in to method
through the meta-dialogue.
Interested in specific things,
seeking connection, independent,
prepared to keep in seeking
affinity.

Consensus
Workshop

Wire Work

Socratic Dialogue

Open space

If you werent enjoying it you

could
Step back this required you to
visibly disengage and fade away.
Not do the making or do it less
intensively there was space for
quiet exit but some social pressure
to have a go.
Withdraw from the trying very hard
aspects of the Consensus Workshop
by taking part but knitting at the
same time. [see below]
Try less hard and could say this isnt
me but social rules of having a go
made that hard.

Initiate a meta-dialogue but only if

this respects the terms of Socratic
Dialogue. Disengage through
shopping on your phone. Resist in
other ways. Typing, drawing. Or
shape processes by pushing the
debate into a different level.
Step away or move without any
issue as its part of the framework of
Open Space. Social rules often
remerge?

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Registers of Knowing: Structure and Emergence

We might think stereotypically of academic Ways of Knowing and community Ways of
Knowing, or rational Ways of Knowing and emotional Ways of Knowing as equally
valuable, but distinct, doing different things based on different frames of reference. The
knitting is maybe a more useful metaphor as it shows intertwining of distinct strands and we
can see that they contribute to the whole (even if we dont quite know how we have to
look at the back to see the mess). (Sarah Banks, 24th May 2014)
the bloody knitting (Helen Graham, 24th May 2014)

The knitting takes a short rest. A disruption to a process that required commitment or a weaver of
new ways of thinking about knowing?
Each of the workshops we did was structured quite differently to enable different ideas of knowing
and different forms of sociality. Perhaps the most marked experience of this was the knitting. The
knitting was not packed away after the Making as Methods workshop and continued to grow, be
added to and knotted together during the Consensus Workshop. Two quite different forms of
structuring and imagining collectivity were happening simultaneously. The Consensus Workshop was
structured through a movement from individual to the collective via thinking, writing, talking,
listening carefully and working hard to see connections. The knitting was structured by its form and
the practices of making. It annoyed some of us as it seemed to disrupt the concentration necessary
for the Consensus Workshop. Yet for others of us, the knitting worked to gathered new affinities
within the group of those who cared about the knitting. Yet from this apparent tension between
making and the cognitive process of consensus seeking, metaphors emerged and stuck and became
core to the conceptual texture of the Ways of Knowing project. Weaving, strands, knot, mess.
What, at the time for some of us, felt like a distraction was also a contributor and enabler of
thinking. Both approaches crisscrossing and enabling and constraining different kinds of possibilities
at the same time.

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Approach

Knowledge comes
from
Taxonomies
Committing to the
game as if on its own
terms while getting
its meta-purpose is to
challenge the very
terms of the game.
Making as Method Manifesting ideas.
Emphasis on process
and not the outcome
speaking for itself.
Question about skills
base necessary to do
this well?

Consensus
Workshop

Wire Work

Socratic Dialogue

Open space

Imagined politics of
collectivity
Be prepared to
challenge and
provoke others.

Loose collectivity,
relaxed, enabling.
While the approach
might be used in
research design as a
preclude to
convergent and
action-orientated
approaches, in itself it
enables selfexpression.
Building something
Committed to each
together that can be
other as the right
known or acted on.
space/unit for
working.
Putting
Task individual
understandings of how focused on task,
animals look and
companionable,
balance into practice
supportive, provides
and in ways which
social context for
might draw both on
effort.
abilities with
manipulating wire and
conceptual/metaphori
cal connections
Logically working
The group must all be
through an example
present and all try
and slowly building
very hard to work
collective
through the example.
understanding.
Through the insights
everyone can bring,
better collective
insight will emerge.
Through people talking Not wasting time on
about what matters to things you dont have
them with people who energy for, finding the
share that interest and right people to
urgency.
discussion and act
with on things you do.

Politics of change?
Spark, ignition,
challenge.

Enabling, allow for

personal growth,
emotional and
social capacity.

Enabling collective
decision making to
underpin action.
Being with material,
connecting with the
world materially,
being in the
moment of the
emerging task.

Collective
understanding
sense of moral
principles might
enable better
personal and
political decision
making.
Meet people who
might want to act
with you to make
something happen.

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Zining: Drawing together

A zine (pronounced zeen, like magazine) is a self-published, small circulation, noncommercial booklet or magazine, usually produced by one person or a few individuals. (Zines
101)
Creating the Ways of Knowing Zine was a means of forging a way of being together which might
also help us draw the project together; a form and figuration which allowed both for togetherness
and individual expression. We looked at, and drew on, all the materials that had been generated
throughout the project from photos, thread, words, blogs, notes, drawings, sketches to pull
together our different experiences and reflections on the project. The Zine deliberately operates in
different registers. More than a publication for an audience as such it enabled a process of sorting
and conversation that has underpinned and acted as a source for a number of subsequent projects,
event, meeting and planned publications.

The front cover of the Zine produced at the Open Workshop. Illustration by Katie Hill.
We held our end of project event Ways of Knowing in Collaborative and Participatory Research:
How can we know together? How might knowing together and acting together be socially and
politically useful? in January 2014. Over the course of the day we shared a number of the
approaches used in our two workshops as a means of open up the questions posed in the events
title. In the afternoon we created space for people to generate and document their own
conversations and interests through combining Open Space workshop facilitated by Michelle
Bastian and described above and Zining, with the help of Leeds Footprint Workers Co-operative
Zine in a Day workshop.1 Here the Zine acted as an immediate means of capturing the discussion of
the day and allowed us to explore further how making and discussion methods might be
combined. At the final Ways of Knowing event we were joined by Professor Michelle Fine, City
University New York, who help engage the approaches we were exploring with political questions of
evidence and creating change (Fine 2012). She did this through taking a respondent role during the
workshop and through an open early evening lecture.

1 Footprint Workers Co-Operative. See: http://www.footprinters.co.uk/

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Learning from Ways of Knowing

From the Ways of Knowing Zine, the relationship between Ways of Knowing and other Connected
Communities projects.
A key outcome of Ways of Knowing is that, for many of us, our collaborative repertoire has been
expanded. Many of us both brought other Connected Communities projects to Ways of Knowing
and many of us have drawn on Ways of Knowing in other projects which ran alongside or came
afterwards. Given the different logics of individual, collective, knowledge and change suggested
by the different methods we explored, this sense of being able to self-consciously combine
approaches make visible a variety of potentials for future collaborative research projects. Rather
than each approach being seen in competition with each other or even seen pragmatically as for
different purposes, it might be better to think about how different methods might be used in in
ways which act both with, and against, the separations of creativity, cognitive, consensus, divergent
that they initially seem to imply.
Ongoing work:
Some of the Ways of Knowing team are involved in the AHRC Connected Communities Legacy
Programme working in a project Co-producing Legacy? exploring the roles artist have played in
Connected Communities projects through reflecting on the Ways of Knowing project. For more
information on this ongoing work or to view our Zines and other project material see our Ways of
Knowing website:
http://waysofknowing.leeds.ac.uk/

If you would like to be sent paper copies of our two zines, email Helen Graham on
h.graham@leeds.ac.uk

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References and external links

Michelle Fine (2012) Resuscitating Critical Psychology for Revolting Times, Journal of
Social Issues, 68 (2): 416-438

Jo Freeman (1971) The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Available at:
http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Lawrence Grossberg (1992) We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture.
London: Routledge.

Donna Haraway (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn), pp. 575-599.

John Heron and Peter Reason (2001) The Practice of Co-operative Inquiry: Research with, rather
than on, people, in P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of Action Research: Participative
Inquiry and Practice (pp. 179-188). London: Sage 2001. Available at: http://www.peterreason.eu/

Zine World (2010) Zines 101:A Quick Guide to Zines. Available at:
www.undergroundpress.org/pdf/Zines101.pdf

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The Connected Communities

Connected Communities is a cross-Council Programme being led by the AHRC in partnership
with the EPSRC, ESRC, MRC and NERC and a range of external partners. The current vision for
the Programme is:
to mobilise the potential for increasingly inter-connected, culturally diverse,
communities to enhance participation, prosperity, sustainability, health & well-being by
better connecting research, stakeholders and communities.
Further details about the Programme can be found on the AHRCs Connected Communities web
pages at:
www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/connectedcommunities.aspx