The University as the “Imagined Other”: Making Sense of Community Co-Produced Literacy Research

The motivation for working together is really less to do with bringing different skills to bear on a common problem but rather, it is this immediacy of response encountered in the discussion of ideas, combined with the consummate otherness of thought which the collaborative partner brings.¹

Ian Rawlinson and Nick Crowe (2012)

Writing With or Without the “Other”: What Is There to Know? Collaboration can begin with a conversation. Listening Voices, Telling Stories was a project that engaged women from ethnic minority backgrounds in reading poetry from a number of different cultures; they met in a community library in Rotherham, a city located in South Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. Zanib Rasool was one of the community researchers who developed this project. Zanib is from a British South Asian background and is passionate about the need for women to recover their heritage through poetry. She suggested that together we could read Urdu women poets from Pakistan who were oft en overlooked in school poetry teaching. As an activist in the community, she was also determined to support women and work with them to create spaces for them to organize. I had a conversation with Zanib that took place in a community library, which I recorded in my fieldnotes in March of 2015:

We arrived early, as I was planning to talk to Zanib about the safe spaces for women and girls project. We talked about the ways in which it was important for women to do things for themselves. Zanib talked about a mother and toddler group run by women volunteers which closed when paid workers took it over. She mentioned a toy library that had been very successful. She talked about how informal ways of getting together—like her group at school—enabled different kinds of conversations to happen.

Here Zanib’s focus was on the need to work informally to create safe spaces for things to happen with a focus on women and girls. She was working through her experience of community development through organizing a literary project. This made sense to me.

My interest in community change processes emerged out of my own history. From 1987 to 1994 I was an outreach worker for an adult literacy scheme in Hammersmith (London) as an employee of the Council for Racial Equality. This was a neighborhood project that included a commitment to a student-led vision of what would happen within the adult literacy project, and it emphasized community writing and participation. I worked to support parents in setting up writing groups to produce poetry and life stories for publication. My main concern became constructing spaces for women where they could address their experiences. I continued working with the group outside of my role as an outreach worker because of my commitment to the goals of anti-racist practice within communities, reversing and shift ing sites of power to lever change as and when it was needed (Bird and Pahl 1994).

Our shared history of community development work created a space where we could rely on collective understandings and visions. Over the years Zanib and I had planned and developed projects together: Zanib in her role as community activist, and I in my role as academic in the School of Education at a local university. Most recently our work had focused on the cultural context of civic engagement and the need to engage women in projects that were self-directed and owned by the women themselves, in community settings. This particular project was undertaken in the context of what was then known as the Imagine project, part of a national initiative called the Connected Communities program, which was funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council (esrc) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (ahrc). This was a radical new funding initiative that asked university researchers and academics to write proposals that were co-designed with community partners. The program was run by the ahrc in the United Kingdom (see Facer and Enright 2016).

Imagine is a unique project that sought to create research...