Challenge-Led Research Practices

Mapping environmental sustainability explains the development of visual mapping techniques with practical case studies that describe their application in environmental sustainability projects, from working with farmers and their networks to using visual mapping with indigenous communities and managing coastal environments.

This text brings together academics, artists, practitioners and ‘community activists’ to explore the possibilities for and tensions of social justice work under the contemporary drive for community-oriented ‘impact’ in the academy.

How can we re-establish universities’ social purpose? The solution lies with asking not only ‘what are we good at?’, but also ‘what are we good for?’. Chris Brink shows how universities can – and should - promote positive social change.

This book explores the critical role that local knowledge plays in public policy processes as well as its role in the co-production of policy relevant knowledge with the scientific and professional communities.

This book highlights embodiment as a qualitative research tool and outlines what it means to do embodied research in research. It shows how using this non-invasive approach with vulnerable research participants can help service users or research participants to be involved in the co- production of services and in participatory research.

Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision.

Who are universities for? argues for a large-scale shake up of how we organise higher education. It includes radical proposals for reform of the curriculum and how we admit students to higher education. Offering concrete solutions, it provides a way forward for universities to become more responsive to challenges.

Research Ethics in the Real World highlights the links between research ethics and individual, social, professional, institutional, and political ethics. Helen Kara considers all stages of the research process and provides guidance for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods researchers about how to act ethically throughout.

This book addresses the frustrating gap between research conducted on effective practices and the lack of routine use of such practices. The author introduces a model for reducing this gap, highlighting the roles of social networks, research evidence, practitioner/policymaker decision-making, research-practice-policy partnerships.

This book shows how community groups can work in partnership with universities to imagine better futures and make them happen, co-producing knowledge to achieve positive change.

Student fees have saddled graduates with enormous debt, satisfaction rates are low, a high proportion of graduates are in non-graduate jobs, and public debt from unpaid loans is rocketing. This timely and challenging analysis gives robust new policy proposals to encourage excellence and ultimately benefit society.

With a diverse range of case studies, and chapters co-written between academics and community partners, this book shows that co-produced research can be an empowering force by which communities stake a claim in the places they live.