This blogpost by Matthew Green is part of the ISJ series on co-production (autumn-winter 2025). Different post-graduate researchers and academics affiliated to the ISJ share their thoughts about doing co-production as part of their research. The blogs follow a question-answer format.

 

Image by Chris Curry | Unsplash

What drew you to doing and researching co-production?  

As a sports enthusiast, I have always been drawn to teamwork and ensuring each person’s voice and skills are genuinely valued, and co-production helps ensure my values are embedded within the research process. I came to co-production through a fellow ISJ postgraduate researcher, Alice Little, and my PhD supervisor, Charlotte Haines Lyon, who introduced me to participatory research and invited me to engage in co-production with young people.

Seeing the young people practice reciprocity, shared decision-making, and critical reflexivity showed me that rigorous and impactful inquiry can also be relationally grounded. This experience enabled me to shift from consulting participants to co-producing knowledge, collaboratively developing research questions, collecting data, sharing authorship and disseminating our shared learnings. For me, co-production asks me to share power, to stay accountable to my personal and professional values, and to produce research with people rather than about them.  

 

What was your first experience of co-productive research and what did you learn from it?   

My first co-productive project was with NextGenLeaders, a group of secondary school students from an area of social deprivation who were already organising for localised social change. Their leadership, enthusiasm and expertise broadened my sense of what research is and can be: they reframed the questions, set priorities, and insisted on outputs that mattered in their context. I learned that social justice action is most meaningful when those most affected define the agenda, and when ‘evidence’ is understood as lived as well as measured.

That early lesson has continued through later work, including the co-production of the research article Humanising Research Relationships: Democratising education-based enquiry with student researchers, developed with fellow ISJ postgraduate researcher Alice Little and three student researchers as part of the Toilet Talk project. Together we showed how co-produced participatory research humanises roles, shares expertise, and generates findings that communities can use. The process of co-producing an academic article with the three student researchers enabled me to critically consider why we publish as academics and how we can ensure the voice of students is valued and heard.  

 

What are the challenges of co-productive research, and how have you approached these?  

From my relatively brief experiences of co-production, what I have found is that time is the essential (and often scarce) resource. Building relationships that are trusting, and reciprocal, cannot be rushed, especially when the aim is to rebalance power and avoid extractive encounters. Thus far, I have approach this with honesty, integrity and respect: being transparent about constraints, co-creating expectations, and returning to communities even when a grant or project ends. Practically, it means listening more than talking, making space for disagreement, and treating process as part of the outcome. It also means resourcing accessibility, from when and where we meet to how decisions are made and credited.

What I have learnt is that the relationship forming stage cannot be rushed and truly authentic co-production requires constant consideration of research relationships and how these can shape the project. In the future, where timelines are tight, I will seek to protect relationship-building as a non-negotiable, because that is where trustworthy knowledge and sustainable change are made. From my experience, the challenge is a values choice – we must invest time in people because co-production is first and foremost relational.  

 

What does co-productive research allow you to do that other methods don’t? Can you illustrate this with an example?   

Co-production lets me do things other methods rarely achieve. It legitimises lived expertise, distributes decision-making, and turns reflexivity into a shared discipline. Because people closest to the issue help define questions and interpret data, the knowledge produced is situated, relevant and more likely to be used. In youth-facing work, for example, I have co-facilitated listening circles and analysis workshops where students named what mattered—often reframing our initial question entirely. They chose the language that felt respectful, identified audiences who needed to hear the findings, and co-designed the formats for sharing—briefings, workshops, posters, or digital stories.

This broadened our impact from a single publication to multiple, accessible touchpoints, and created capacity-building on both sides. Crucially, co-production enables us to ask for courage to let go, curiosity to be surprised, and a commitment to fairness that shows up in practical details.  

 

What one writer or concept has been most influential on your approach to co-production?  

Paulo Freire’s dialogic pedagogy has shaped my approach most. Freire invites us to problem-posing inquiry where understanding is built through dialogue. In practice, this means designing processes that support shared analysis: listening circles, co-interpretation sessions, and collective decisions about what counts as a meaningful outcome. Freire also keeps the ethics central, co-production is not a technique but a politics of relationship, grounded in humility, hope and reciprocity.

From him I take practical habits by posing problems, asking questions, and seeking to make power visible, whilst aiming to stay reflexive about my own position. Alongside this, I draw on an ethic of care: attending to safety, consent, pace and accessibility so that participation is dignifying, not extractive. These influences have helped me build confidence in overcoming the ‘messy nature’ of research and create a space where new connections can form. 

 

Has being involved in co-production project changed the ways you think about research? Or think about the world?   

Co-production has changed how I think about research and the world. I now see research less as a linear sequence and more as an ongoing relationship measured by reciprocity, accessibility and usefulness in people’s lives. It has expanded my sense of evidence and sharpened my awareness of how methods can reproduce—or resist—inequality. I have learned to move at the speed of trust, to share power and authorship, and to design for dignity: paying people, removing barriers, and returning findings in forms that communities choose.

This shift has made me both more humble and more hopeful. It encourages me to challenge prejudice with care, to value multiple ways of knowing, and to stand alongside partners rather than speak for them. In day-to-day terms, it means I prioritise relationships in planning, protect time for reflection, and keep asking who benefits and how we will know. Practically, it has also altered how I pace and evaluate projects: I build time for learning, disagreement and changing course when participants’ priorities shift. Consent is iterative, not one-off; credit and data ownership are shared; dissemination is a dialogue rather than a broadcast.  

 

If you’d like to read more: 

Green, M., Little, A., Dobson, E., Glover, O. and Patterson, J., 2025. Humanising research relationships: Democratising education-based enquiry with student researchers. Research in Education, 121(2), pp.217-231. 

 

Green, M., Dobson, T. and Haines Lyon, C., 2025. “Student voice is not as important compared to teachers/adults”: towards critical capacity building for school-based youth participatory action research. Quality Education for All, 2(2), pp.41-57.