The annual conference of the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) is a celebration of engagement practice in all its forms. Teresa Murjas attended this year’s event and reflects on what she saw and heard and what it might mean for our practice here at Reading.
In May I attended Engage Live 2024; the annual conference organised by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). This is a dynamic forum for PER-related debate, which this year focused on innovation in public engagement, envisioning PER futures, and on championing inclusive knowledge.
Keynote speakers were Steven Hill (Research England), and Rebecca Blackman (Arts Council England), who talked about how funding can be used to stimulate more open, inclusive research engagement, alongside their visions for how the future of public engagement might look.
Hill observed how the profile of PER has grown since the NCCPE was established by the UK funding councils and Wellcome Trust in 2008. Looking to the future and asked to envision the priorities of an imagined ‘REF 2044’, he suggested there would be increased emphasis on engagement and impact, with collaboration as a key metric, a reduction in what might now be considered ‘traditional’ research outputs, and an expanded focus on multidisciplinary teams working together to address societal challenges.
Blackman reflected on the outcomes of ACE’s Creative People and Places funding stream, which aims to build access for people to arts regardless of where they live. She described this as ACE’s first evidence-based arts programme, underpinned by an emphasis on radical listening practice, namely, beginning a working process by focusing on community concerns, needs and outcomes, and on co-developing arts and cultural activity to explore with people what they want to change.
These introductory talks framed a full programme of thought-provoking presentations. For example, integrating the story of her lived experience of disability, Tanvir Bush (Bath Spa University) explored research and co-creation with Deaf and Disabled Communities, considering the outcomes of engagement that models transformational inclusion and compassionate empathy, underpinned by a social versus a medical model of disability.
Christina Boswell (University of Edinburgh and British Academy) discussed the Academy’s report on Public Trust in Science-for-Policy Making, which investigated the conditions for increasing public trust in scientific research. Drawing on experiences during the Covid pandemic to illustrate some of her points, Boswell emphasised the finding that publics want to be informed of gaps and uncertainties in research studies, and that there is an appetite for nuance and transparency in science communication, signalling the fact that scientific process can help form the basis for establishing longer-term trust.
Karen Salt (Manchester Metropolitan University) discussed how to build sustained community involvement in knowledge production, including fair practices in payments for people’s time and effort, and focused on questioning how research cultures are measured and evaluated and whose labour they embrace. Salt’s presentation contributed to a vital strand of discussion concerning systemic racism within higher education, with observable failures to value the lived experiences of people from marginalised communities being noted.
Accordingly, the final plenary was a chaired conversation between two scholars also committed to systemic change: Ima Jackson (Glasgow Caledonian University), a community-engaged researcher working with people who are adversely racialised, and Budd Hall (University of Victoria) the co-holder of the UNESCO Chair in Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education, a joint partnership with the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), located in New Delhi. Jackson called for the strengthening of in-house marginalisation expertise across the UK higher education sector, including the hiring of non-academics. She spoke about her position as Co-Chair of the Antiracism Interim Governance Group, which is leading on the development of a new national anti-racism Observatory, to help establish systemic anti-racism in Scotland.
Hall reflected on the emergence of the term ‘participatory research’ in the 1970s, noting it was coined in Tanzania where he then worked. He spoke about the growth of a participatory research network built in civil society rather than within universities, where the idea was initially met with scepticism. He also discussed the co-creation of UNESCO’s Knowledge for Change (K4C) Consortium in 2017, with Rajesh Tandon from PRIA in India, which focuses on training researcher/mentors, and underscored the importance of retaining the majority world roots of such community-based research practices.
Many academics at the conference presented alongside their non-academic collaborators, and a range of formats were available for reflecting on innovation, creativity and reflexivity in PER practice: participatory workshops, interactive activities, storytelling, cross-institutional panels, a poster party, and outdoor activities such as walking and talking with a research/engagement partner you were ‘matched’ with.
Three examples struck me as resonant for our practice here at Reading:
- A joint interactive presentation from the Museums Association, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and Museum X concerning a performance-as-research project focused on engaging young people in Cambridge with heritage sector institutions around hidden local histories, and on increasing racial literacy in this context through the formation of a youth collective. The project sought to underline the value of museums in the research landscape, but centrally it also aimed to cultivate moments when, for example, the youth collective was leading the creative work that was being stimulated by the research in question, as their teachers stepped out of the room. Closer discussion emerged within this conference session about teachers’ positions as gatekeepers when it comes to researchers engaging with schools, and the impact of limitations in time and resources in such contexts when it comes to sustainably building EDI-informed school cultures.
- A workshop from London Metropolitan University guided participants through a process to re-examine the concept of the Wheel of Consent in applied participatory research, building an emphasis on the idea of attuned consent – namely, an ethically motivated process that is ongoing and responsive, where consent to research participation is actively revisited throughout a project, rather than established at one point at its inception.
- I also engaged with an immersive audio work concerning research into chronic cough, entitled ‘One in Ten’, led by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Manchester. The activity involved listening and moving to a soundscape that was interwoven with new research data and stories told by those affected.
The innovative work of Reading researchers and professional services colleagues could be shared in many of the varied NCCPE conference presentation formats and I hope that we might in future form a stronger collective presence in this important forum for debate and transdisciplinary, cross-institutional practice sharing.
Some filmed conference presentations and discussions will be made available on the NCCPE website in due course.
Teresa Murjas is the Academic Champion for Public Engagement (working with researchers from the Heritage & Creativity and Prosperity & Resilience research themes).