Collaborative research can bring communities to the heart of social research and provide a lens on the everyday experiences of ordinary people living extraordinary lives, capturing the funds of knowledge held in communities that exist outside the corridors of education institutions. If delivered in an ethical way, co-production can empower communities and elevate voices that traditionally have been on the margins. Through collaboration, we can bridge the knowledge gap that exists between communities and universities and raise community aspirations.

In this article we explore the ways in which universities and communities can work together drawing on our experience of a community-university co-produced project called ‘Imagine’. We reflect on our different experiences of working together and affectively co-produce the article, drawing on a conversation we held together. We locate our discussion within the projects we worked on. We look at the experiences of working across community and university and affectively explore these. We explore the following key questions: How do we work with complexity and difference?Who holds the power in research?What kinds of methods surface hidden voices?How can we co-create equitable research spaces together?What did working together feel like? Our co-writing process surfaces some of these tensions and difficulties as we struggle to place our voices into an academic article. We surface more of our own tensions and voices and this has become one of the dominant experiences of doing co-produced research. We explore the mechanisms of co-production as being both a process of fusion but also its affective qualities. Our discussions show that community partners working with academics have to bear the emotional labour; by ‘standing in the gap’ they are having to move between community and university. We also recognise the power of community co-writing as a form that can open up an opportunity to speak differently, outside the constraining spaces of academia.

This chapter offers a sense of the legacy of this book and identify its key features, in order to provide a summary of what the authors have learned from doing the book. The central goal in writing this book has been to demonstrate that communities produce their own forms of knowledge, and that those forms are valid — and valuable — ways of knowing. The chapter articulates the value of this kind of research for community knowledge production that is emergent, situated, and future oriented. As such, this chapter identifies four key themes: thinking across difference, the arts as a mode of inquiry and as an agent of change, rethinking knowledge production practices, and hope and the importance of transformational change. The chapter then reflects on these themes.

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.

This article critically engages with the voices of South Asian, Muslim women living in Rotherham to provide an emic gaze (Pike, 1967) of the intersectional lived experience of the ‘cultural others’. Everyday voices of South Asian, Muslim women activists living in the UK are marginalised based on prejudicial cultural assumptions. We demonstrate our challenge of negative discourses of the ‘passive and culturally oppressed female’. Our activism confronts racism predicated on cultural stereotypes embedded in state structures in contemporary Britain. This article explores the actions and tensions of confronting racism by South Asian, Muslim women living in Rotherham.