A Field Guide to Artist-Researcher Collaborations

How can you ensure that collaborations involving academic researchers and creative practitioners are as ethical and effective as possible?

This Field Guide is designed to help you navigate the terrain, not as a how-to or step-by-step process, but rather as a tool to aid exploration. Field Guide’s are particularly useful when exploring and engaging with unfamiliar terrain, and this one has been designed to be interactive, so you can annotate and doodle in it as you conduct your own explorations in new realms.

A product of collaboration in its own right, the Field Guide is a product of twenty-two artists, creatives, and researchers working together to identify the main challenges they face when seeking to work together, and offering guidance on how to navigate them. These include topics relating to:

• Fair pay
• Power structures
• Navigating one another’s worlds
• Mutual respect
• Communication

It is designed to be of value to anyone interested in co-creative research practices, whether as a creative, researcher, student, or interested bystander. You can read it cover to cover, or sample only the knowledge you need. We just hope it helps you to navigate these relationships with greater ease, effectiveness, and empathy!

 This is the first book in The Outwith Field Guide’s book series, which helps to equip researchers and collaborators with tools that can help them along their various participatory research journeys.

Contributing Co-Authors:

• Helen Boden
• Rhiannon Bull
• Jenny Capon
• Catherine Cartwright
• Federica Cologna
• Tainá da Rocha Val (Cinna)
• Susie Rose Dalton
• Kate Fox
• John Glenday
• Robin Grainger
• Brian Hartley
• Elsie MacDonald
• Hector MacInnes
• Eilidh Manson
• Moral Masuoka
• Jean McEwan
• Susan Morrison
• Nicola Osborne
• Rosie Aspinall Priest
• Bobby Sayers
• John Scott
• Josie Tothill
• Jimmy Turner
• Lisa Williams