CENTRE FOR PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

• About us
• Events
  Search events: Advanced search
  • Browse all the events
  • What's on guide (PDF)
  • University events calendar
  • Discover 2012
  • Past Matters
  • Know your Bristol
  • Productive Margins
  • Seeds of Change
  • Museums at night
• Information for staff
• Engagement at Bristol
• Student engagement
• Take a course
• Using our facilities
• Engaged University Steering Group
• Blog
• Changing perspectives

Productive Margins

In this new project, beginning in April 2013, we will be connecting communities in Bristol and South Wales to co-produce new forms of engagement in decision-making across politics, policy and the arts.

Community engagement needs radical re-design. All too often decision-makers think that ‘community engagement’ means inviting communities to comment on decisions that have already been made. This leaves isolated and excluded communities feeling even more disempowered. This new and exciting programme of research asks:

• What would happen if diverse communities and academics came together to re-shape engagement, to work creatively with ideas that touch on society, law, history and art?
• Can research release the creativity, knowledge and passions of communities at the margins of power to co-produce new forms of engagement and decision-making?

Who are we?

The Productive Margins: Regulation for Engagement research programme is a collaboration between research teams in the University of Bristol and Cardiff University with expertise in law, arts, humanities and the social sciences, and community organisations and social enterprises in Bristol and post-industrial South Wales.

What are we researching?

We have three main themes:

• Mobilising neighbourhoods: understanding how neighbourhoods can become bridges to engagement with regulators, policy-makers and business.
• Harnessing digital space: experimenting with websites and social media to create on-line opportunities for communities to access expertise and develop new skills to engage in policy-making and politics.
• Spaces for dissent: identifying how new understandings and ways of working emerge when communities resist authority; exploring if and how these practices create new forms of engagement.

How are we going to do it?

We will set up the Productive Communities Research Forum where academics and communities will come together to determine the research agenda and design research that arises from everyday life rather than the interests of powerful institutions of university researchers.

Through a website and other social media we will create spaces where ideas about community needs and different ways of engaging can be discussed, explored and acted upon.

Through community-based festivals we will share our ideas with a wider audience of communities, policy makers and businesses.

Further information about the project can be found in the case for support (PDF, 612 KB). Paper copies of the Productive Margins flyer (PDF, 929 KB) are also available on request.

If you want to find out more...

Please contact the Productive Margins Research Team

• E productive-margins@bristol.ac.uk
• T +44 (0)117 954 6714

          

 

Productive Margins is supported by:
    
   

Images from top: Daniel Oliver Photography, Dave Pratt, Janice Lane, Sally Ryde