This article explores the co-production of research as creative, speculative, and eventful rather than as research processes determined by equality, empowerment and social justice. There are persuasive critiques of participatory and co-produced methods. In response, the case is made for focusing instead on the complex processes through which ideas, affects and relational capacities emerge, are nurtured or obscured, and circulate as part of the complex processes of co-producing research. The argument is developed with reference to a recent research project on youth loneliness. Through process philosophy and speculative approaches, the co-productive imagination illuminates the necessary imaginative work of conceiving propositions, techniques of relation and methodological tactics that move us through creative advance to eventful realisations that something in our research matters! Through an ethics of the event the aim of research becomes collaboratively creating new potentials in a world in process.

This article reports on one part of an ongoing project, the Near Future School, which aims to translate and explore the potential of participatory design fiction practices for use with young people and those that work with them to explore near future scenarios of education that open up alternative and plural futures in the context of processes of foreclosure in a neoliberalising society. The focus here is to explore the practical and ethical issues of developing a speculative form of governance, using the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza, as an act of imaginative world building through participatory design fictions. The research raises a series of questions and issues relating to understanding how design fiction's multiple inheritances, from fiction and design or art and design, need to be better understood and enacted within participatory design fiction processes.

The article engages with the opportunities and constraints raised by embedded research during times of rapid and extensive organisational change. Embedded research is an increasingly common approach for funding PhD studentships. The rapid and extensive reforms of the English public sector pose significant and underexplored challenges for embedded researchers and research. The author was embedded during his PhD and here he explores different metaphors – ‘critical friend’, ‘critical nephew’ and ‘critical orphan’ – to define the relationship between himself and the organisation in which he was embedded. The methodological and theoretical development of the research is then outlined in terms of the autonomy and access of the ‘critical orphan’ embedded research relationship. The article concludes that although ‘orphanship’ can be a positive development for the research, the lack of contribution to the sponsor organisation may prevent the further development of embedded research relationships in public sector organisations.

This paper explores how critical research might impact on social practice. Over the past decade, Piper and colleagues have identified the negative implications of the moral panic around child abuse in constraining intergenerational relationships and in diminishing the ability and commitment of adults acting in loco parentis to benefit young people in education, childcare, and sports coaching. Achieving impact in this area is complex and challenging because the research outcomes run counter to powerful social discourses and institutional interests and the researchers have limited communicational resources. In response, this paper proposes a new conceptualisation of the research topic, drawing on Aristotelian ideas of employing wisdom and professional judgment in pursuit of doing the right thing. Based on this analysis, an impact strategy is discussed which purposefully interrupts the ‘no touch’ discourse in coaching via a social media campaign that emphasises positive memories and motivations of sports coaches working with young people.

This article proposes an innovative approach for attending to and imaginatively engaging with the co-production in research co-production. Research co-production is a popular approach across diverse disciplines and national contexts but there are still questions as to what it means to co-produce research. In response to this problem, I propose we attend to and imaginatively engage with the co-production agenda’s neoliberalizing concerns, its histories, inheritances and functions, which relate to the neoliberalization of the state, society and the university. Drawing on the work of speculative and process approaches, especially A.N. Whitehead and Isabelle Stengers, the article dramatizes a co-produced research project focused on youth loneliness. Dramatization is an approach that seeks to find new stories, resources, and imaginations from which we might find a new beginning for our research practice. Four propositions drive this process of dramatization: inspire research co-production as eventful, admit that which we resist in co-production, move from contradictions to contrasts, and imagine state-like forms for research co-production. The eventful outcome is the re-imagining of co-production in relation to a speculative state-like form that is appropriate to authorize and value the collaborative knowledge that is created in collaborative research.