This paper examines the potential of co-produced arts-based methodologies through the lens of a social cohesion project, from the perspectives of five artists. Arts methodologies can be useful in working across different disciplines and across university and community boundaries to create equitable knowledge production processes. The ways in which art is used in community settings as a mode of collaboration are explored, using the reflections from five artists who were involved in the social cohesion project together. This paper argues that co-producing artistic approaches to social cohesion is a complex, multilayered and sometimes fragile process, but that recognizing and discussing understandings of the role of power and voice within co-produced projects enables effective team communication.

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Research with communities, even co-produced research with a commitment to social justice, can be limited by its expression in conventional disciplinary language and format. Vibrant, warm and sometimes complex encounters with community partners become contained through the gesture of representation. In this sense, 'writing up' can actually become a kind of slow violence towards participants, projects and ourselves. As a less conventional and containable form of expression, poetry offers an alternative to the power games of researching 'on' communities and writing it up. It is excessive in the sense that it goes beyond the cycles of reduction and representation, allowing the expression of subjective (and perhaps sometimes even contradictory) impressions from participants. In this cowritten paper we explore poetry as a social research method through subjective testimony and in the light of our Connected Communities-funded projects (Imagine, Threads of Time and Taking Yourself Seriously), where poetry as method came to the fore as a way of hearing and representing voices differently.

Acclaimed publisher and editor Neil Astley, founder of Bloodaxe Books, guest-edits this special transatlantic all-poetry issue, featuring poets from North America, Great Britain, and Ireland. The issue contains a stirring diversity of work, with writers who have roots everywhere from Guyana to Pakistan to Zambia, and also features poetry in Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic. Much of the work is from accomplished British poets who are still little-known in the States. As Astley writes in his introduction, the issue aims to break down “the illogical divide between readerships on either side of the Atlantic,” and spark a conversation that will enliven and invigorate both poetic traditions.

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