Introduction

In what ways do regulatory regimes enact, delimit and inhibit the progress of families on low incomes across England and Wales? Although they may not explicitly interact, diverse regimes are affectively experienced, including immigration status (including from European Union [EU] countries), employment assessments and activation, mental health, child protection, structural and overt racism, and the nonportability of professional qualifications across national systems. In this chapter, we explore how contemporary social practice art materialises these intersections and enables disruptions of regulatory regimes in ways not possible using traditional social science approaches. We focus on a research team that included artists Close and Remote, and explain how the team co-produced, with community members and academics, a socially engaged artwork – Life Chances – that aimed to generate new knowledges about the regulatory regimes that low-income families with children experience. Aiming towards what sociologist Yasmin Gunaratnam (2012) describes as a form of improvisational empathy, Life Chances worked with Thomas More's (1516) Utopia and Ruth Levitas's (2013) Utopia as Method as ‘a form of speculative sociology of the future’ (Levitas, 2013: 85). By staging and troubling contradictory notions of ‘life chances’ through art, we specifically ask how the regulatory services that families encounter in two urban settings – the Easton area of Bristol and Butetown, Riverside and Grangetown in Cardiff – shape, constrain and enable the life chances of individual families and communities, or what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) refers to as doxa, and how these services might be ‘otherwise’.

Life Chances was co-designed by academics from Bristol and Cardiff Universities, artists Close and Remote, and two community organisations: the Single Parent Action Network (SPAN) in Bristol and South Riverside Community Development Centre (SRCDC) in Cardiff. From the outset, there was an intention to work with social practice art. In addition to its emphasis on collaborative working closely reflecting the principles of co-production, we wanted to work with the everyday materials that families on low incomes encounter. Moreover, we were interested in working with a creative practice that would manifest the distributed, entangled and durational relationships across diverse regulatory regimes.

Introduction

What is it like be a community partner in an ambitious university-led co-produced research programme? Is co-production on equal terms really possible? What is in it for us and why did we get involved in the first place? There are many articles about engagement, co-production and participatory practices written by researchers and mainly for academic audiences. Despite the ambition of many to be inclusive and to ‘represent the voices’ of community members and organisations, those accounts are rarely written by community organisations themselves. Instead they are often written on our behalf, which in itself poses questions around accessibility, opportunities and the rules that govern research processes. With this chapter, we want to make a contribution to the debate about co-production and participatory practices from a community perspective.

The ‘we’ in this article are Allan Herbert and Nathan Evans from South Riverside Community Development Centre Ltd (SRCDC), Tove Samzelius previously from Single Parent Action Network (SPAN) and Sue Cohen, a Community Co-investigator. All of us are part of the Productive Margins research initiative, a major five-year co-produced interdisciplinary research programme involving the University of Bristol, Cardiff University and nine community organisations from England and Wales. The programme is seeking to remap the terrain of regulation, by involving the knowledge, passions and creativity of citizens often considered on the margins of politics and policymaking. In doing so the programme aims to ‘move away from problematics of participation as simply ‘lay’ involvement in pre-determined regulatory structures (Newman, 2005; McDermont et al, 2009), to creatively embrace engagement as constitutive of regulation in ways that fundamentally challenge its forms’ (McDermont et al, 2012).

It was the ambition to enable ground level rather than top-down perspectives on regulating for engagement that led to SPAN and SRCDC's interest in participating in the process. We were also interested in the quest for ways of designing regulatory regimes that began from the capabilities of communities excluded from the mainstream. Both organisations value participatory research and have been engaged in anti-poverty work for many years with the aim of supporting people experiencing socioeconomic exclusion to empower themselves, while also challenging structures and regulatory frameworks that contribute to processes of marginalisation. The co-produced research ambitions of Productive Margins are, however, a new way forward for both SPAN and SRCDC.