ABSTRACT
The co-construction of research-based knowledge by researchers and so-called practitioners is often conceptualised as a dialogic, participatory research practice. This chapter proposes that in some cases of collaborative knowledge construction, the concepts of ‘enrolment’ and ‘negotiation’ capture what takes place in the interaction between researcher and researched more precisely than ‘participation’ and ‘dialogue’. The argument is supported by a short account of what I call the co-production of strategic knowledge in a particular research project. In this project I saw that working with practitioners (in this case, architects) and intervening in their professional work resulted in mutual learning and change in practice, but I also realised that this interactive practice could not be described satisfactorily with the vocabulary of action research or dialogic communication research. In this chapter I seek to show that ‘enrolment’ and ‘negotiations’ address some of the same issues as ‘participation’ and ‘dialogue’ but are bound up with another view of knowledge production and communication, validity and ethics. In contrast to the concepts of participation and dialogue, they make us think of the co-creation of knowledge in terms that point not to subjects and perspectives, as does much dialogic theory (Black 2008), but to network formation. As such, the chapter offers an enlargement of the vocabulary designated to describe collaborative research practices. The aim of the chapter is not to advance one type of research over another but to discuss the epistemological implications of using different types of vocabulary. The choice of terms has implications for the kinds of insights produced—not in terms of their quality but in terms of the focus they entail. Black (2008) argues for a holistic understanding of communicative situations, where dialogic moments are seen as occurring alongside other forms of interpersonal communication. Her aim—to be clear about the naming of different kinds of interaction—is quite close to this chapter’s concern with the naming of collaborative research situations.
