This blogpost by Obasanjo Bolarinwa is part of the ISJ series on co-production. Different post-graduate researchers and academics affiliated to the ISJ share their thoughts about doing co-production as part of their research. This blog follows a question-answer format.
Image by V. Guarneros-Meza |
What drew you to doing and researching co-production?
My engagement with co-production is rooted in both personal background and scholarly ethos. Trained as a demographer and global public health researcher, my work has consistently focused on marginalised populations whose voices are often absent from knowledge production, particularly women with disabilities, adolescents, migrants, and displaced communities in low- and middle-income settings.
Growing up and being educated in Nigeria exposed me early to the disconnect between policy-driven research and lived realities. Many interventions that appeared methodologically robust failed in practice because they were not shaped by those they purported to serve. This awareness, combined with my later academic training in the United Kingdom and South Africa, shaped a strong commitment to equity-oriented, participatory, and rights-based research. Co-production, therefore, was not an abstract methodological choice but an ethical response to entrenched power imbalances in global health research.
What was your first experience of co-productive research, and what did you learn from it?
My earliest substantive experience of co-productive research emerged through qualitative work with young girls and women in South Africa, particularly studies exploring sexual experiences, maternal health access, and healthcare interactions. In these projects, community members and young girls and women advocates were not treated merely as participants but as contributors to question framing, data interpretation, and dissemination priorities.
What I learned most profoundly was that co-production improves not only relevance but also analytical depth. Participants reframed what I initially conceptualised as ‘barriers’ into broader narratives of dignity, autonomy, and systemic neglect. This shifted my analytical lens from service utilisation alone to structural violence and institutional exclusion, a shift that has since shaped and continues to shape my broader research agenda.
What are the challenges of co-productive research, and how have you approached these?
Co-productive research presents several challenges. First, it is time- and resource-intensive, particularly when working across cultures, languages, and accessibility needs and which my research team usually experiences since our research focus is often in low-middle-income countries. Second, power asymmetries persist even in participatory settings, especially when academic timelines, funding structures, and institutional expectations are inflexible. Third, there are ethical tensions around representation, decision-making authority, and ownership of outputs.
For example, in some parts of Africa, certain religious and cultural norms restrict women from participating in interviews without the presence or consent of their husbands, even when interviews are conducted in open or community spaces. In such contexts, obtaining the necessary epistemic information from female participants becomes particularly challenging. These constraints are often compounded by unforeseen situations in hard-to-reach communities, even when working with local or non-indigenous data collectors.
To overcome these challenges, I have embedded co-production pragmatically rather than idealistically. This includes budgeting for engagement and accessibility at the proposal stage, using iterative consent and feedback processes, and being transparent about non-negotiable institutional constraints. I also prioritise reflexivity, documenting how decisions are made and whose voices shape particular stages of the research. Importantly, I treat co-production as a continuum rather than a binary standard.
What does co-productive research allow you to do that other methods do not? Can you illustrate this with an example?
Co-production enables access to epistemic knowledge that conventional methods often overlook. It allows research questions to emerge from lived experience rather than solely from theory or datasets, and it improves the legitimacy and uptake of findings, which could possibly lead to policy implementations. For example, in my qualitative study on the sexual experiences of women with disabilities in Lagos, co-productive engagement revealed that healthcare exclusion was not only a function of physical inaccessibility but also of moral judgement and infantilisation by providers. These insights reshaped both the analysis and the policy recommendations, moving beyond infrastructural fixes to include provider training on sexual rights and dignity. Such depth would have been difficult to achieve through secondary data analysis or researcher-led interviews alone.
What one writer or concept has been most influential on your approach to co-production?
My approach to co-production has been strongly shaped by Seye Abimbola’s articulation of dialogical knowledge. Abimbola’s insistence that knowledge should be produced with communities rather than for them resonates deeply with my own research practice, particularly given that much of my work is situated in contexts marked by historical marginalisation and structural inequities. Similarly, bel hooks’ emphasis on mutuality, reflexivity, and the dismantling of hierarchical power relations in knowledge production has informed how I position myself as a researcher within co-productive spaces.
In parallel, intersectionality theory, most notably articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw, has provided a critical lens through which I engage co-production across overlapping dimensions of disability, gender, class, and migration status. Taken together, these frameworks reinforce my understanding of co-production not merely as a methodological choice, but as a political and ethical stance on whose knowledge is valued. They compel an approach in which those most affected by the research are meaningfully engaged from the earliest stages of study design through to implementation and interpretation, ensuring that knowledge is not only inclusive but grounded in lived experience.
Has being involved in co-production projects changed the ways you think about research or the world?
Yes, significantly. Co-production has made me more attentive to humility in research, particularly in global health contexts where academic authority is often privileged over experiential knowledge. It has also reshaped how I think about impact, shifting emphasis from publication metrics alone to relational outcomes, trust-building, and community relevance.
More broadly, it has reinforced my belief that research is a social process with ethical consequences beyond the academy. This perspective now informs how I supervise students, mentor early-career researchers, design curricula, and engage with policy actors. Co-production has therefore moved from being a methodological choice to a guiding principle across my academic practice.
If you’d like to read more:
Abimbola, S. (2025). Unawareness, or what we do not (want to) know In Epidemiological observations and reflections. In Jephcott, F. L., Ash, H. A., & McGuire, C. Epidemiological Obfuscation: Historical and Contemporary Case Studies, London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003540755-15
Abimbola, S. (2025). Epistemic dignity. The Lancet, 406(10516), 2210–2211. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(25)02212-3
Bolarinwa, O. A., Odimegwu, C., Babalola, B. I., & Mohammed, A. (2025). A Qualitative Study Exploring the Sexual Experiences of Women with Disabilities in Lagos, Nigeria. Sexuality and Disability, 43, 2. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11195-024-09881-8
Crenshaw, K., Andrews, K., & Wilson, A. (2024). Introduction: Reframing intersectionality. In K. Crenshaw, K. Andrews and A. Wilson (eds.). Blackness at the Intersection. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 1-20. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350234970.ch-1
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. London: Routledge.
West, S., Schill, C. (2022) Negotiating the ethical-political dimensions of research methods: a key competency in mixed methods, inter- and transdisciplinary, and co-production research. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9, 294. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01297-z
Or explore Obasanjo’s page at The Conversation for more reflections on his co-produced research: Obasanjo Bolarinwa – The Conversation
