Cramer-Greenbaum, Susannah, Yazici, Eda, Keith, Michael, Murji, Karim ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7490-7906, Pile, Steve, Solomos, John and Wang, Ying (2026) What’s in a hyphen? Insights from the field on co-production as methodology. Social and Cultural Geography. ISSN 1464-9365

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Abstract

Drawing on a study of refugee women’s urban mobilities, we examine the mechanisms and infrastructure of arts-based co-production in geography. Many geographers have pointed to the transformative potential of co-productive approaches. In interrogating this potential, we ask how the “co” in co-production can artificially flatten hierarchies of power in research, and asking what the hyphen’s horizontality conceals. By scrutinizing the process and divergent participant temporality, this paper reveals how deeply embedded asymmetries amongst co-production actors challenge the value and outcome of ‘production’ in ways both fruitful and demanding. We worked with nine women who received a bicycle through a charity, The Bike Project. Through a series of workshops, we co-produced a film. By scrutinizing the process and divergent participant temporality, this paper reveals how deeply embedded asymmetries amongst co-production actors challenge the value and outcome of ‘production’ in ways both fruitful and demanding. We evidence how the gap between formal ethical guidelines, the way we write research, and meaningful ethics in practice limits co-production’s potential, and advance emotional value as an undervalued outcome of the approach. We conclude that research at the intersection of geography, migration studies, creative practice, and lived experience may produce both affective and productive value, especially in the afterlives of the project, if due attention is placed on the broader geographies of precarity in immigration status, transportation access, arts funding, labour conditions, power hierarchies and collaboration itself.

Item Type:	Article
Identifier:	10.1080/14649365.2026.2629847
Keywords:	Co-production; higher education; research ethics; refugees; mobility; arts-based research
Subjects:	Education > Higher education
Date Deposited:	03 Mar 2026
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/14688

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