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Co-creation

How can researchers, activists, and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) collaborate while situated within neoliberalism and precarity?

Many researchers and activists operate within neoliberal and precarious contexts, making it harder to come up with sustainable strategies to produce knowledge together.

Photos: © Michelle Geerardyn

Illustrations: © Valentine Zhang (https://www.instagram.com/valentinezhang/)

Cross-country and cross-sector networks built through co-creation

A network of feminist media outlets and magazines from multiple countries was formed organically, growing out of informal contacts made along the way. This will culminate in an in person meeting in Trento in September, building on two earlier preparatory meetings (one in-person, one online).

The project linked up with a global organization of gender professionals to co-produce a series of online “gender profiles” on different topics, including an upcoming one on how anti-gender politics affects professionals in the field. The European partners participate as a minority voice rather than leading it and the partner organization is paid for this work, not just consulted for free.

The Feminist Futures Debate in Budapest succeeded in bringing feminist perspectives into spaces European policy think tanks that don’t normally include them, drawing around 50 participants. This was acknowledged as only a partial win, since the broader “Europe’s futures” conversation still largely excludes feminist framing.

The format was designed to give students a group with little institutional power a structured, assembly-style voice in how their universities are run.

Two concrete examples were shared: one organized in Tenerife, and one run at the University of Edinburgh.

At Edinburgh, the jury focused on student experiences of repression and censorship around Palestine solidarity and trans liberation activism on campus, following a crackdown after October 7th. A trained external facilitator (from an organization specializing in conflict management in activist spaces) ran a half-day workshop designed not just to surface painful experiences of institutional harm, but also to let students imagine and articulate what a genuinely supportive, liberatory university could look like.

The project worked well largely because she was already embedded in the community a PhD student and teacher who knew the participants (many were her own students) personally, having organized alongside them before.

This shared history created a foundation of trust, solidarity, and mutual understanding that made honest, difficult conversations possible participants didn’t have to explain context from scratch, and there was a real sense of being “on the same page” even when new information was distressing.

A model for researcher-activist collaboration

One participant, working with a lesbian association in Hungary, proposed a clear, practical structure: activists and researchers jointly define the research questions from the start, rather than researchers simply studying activists from the outside. Researchers then contribute the technical skills and infrastructure to produce usable data, while activists get the evidence base they need for advocacy in this case, data about LGBT communities currently missing from official statistics, urgently needed now that a political shift in Hungary has opened a window for advocacy.

This was framed as more equal than simply inviting activists to share their perspectives as research subjects.

In a separate project bridging university research and non-academic artists, despite serious structural problems, the team still managed to reallocate a meaningful portion of the project’s funds toward what actually mattered to the artist participants showing some capacity to act on co-creation values even within a flawed system.

Throughout the roundtable, participants directly named uncomfortable structural issues precarity in academic careers, the racial dynamics of whiteness in research relationships, the gap between institutional power and individual researchers’ actual power rather than glossing over them.

One researcher openly stated serious doubt about whether genuine co-creation is even possible given existing power imbalances. This skepticism was treated by the group as a valuable starting point for honest dialogue rather than something to dismiss

Several early-career researchers (PhD students, a recent master’s graduate) openly named the same dilemma: they want to do research that is genuinely bottom-up and community-led, but they operate inside institutions with deadlines, teaching loads, and career pressures that don’t easily accommodate that. One framed it plainly as the conflict between what she believes in and the reality she’s actually in.

A proposed way through this tension: meet community organizations where they’re at, rather than showing up with a fixed research question. Ask what the organization itself needs from the collaboration, not just what the researcher needs from them to avoid simply extracting data, named as a long-standing pattern in research.

What does “co-creating” actually mean and who benefits?

One participant pushed the group to interrogate the term itself: in a neoliberal university where knowledge is quantified and capitalized on, co-created knowledge is “in service of” whom, exactly? She pointed out that much of the real relationship-building researchers do (informal conversations, casual exchanges) happens off the record and isn’t counted as legitimate academic output.

She also raised a sharper critique: “co-creation” can become a buzzword academics use to legitimize and validate their own work and career narrative, rather than a genuine practice.

A related concern: precarious academic contracts (e.g., a contract ending in a few months) make it structurally difficult to build the kind of long-term community trust that real co-creation requires.

The problem of academic language and accessibility

Multiple participants criticized academic writing that claims to denounce capitalism, racism, or oppression while being written in dense, inaccessible, sometimes literally unpronounceable language undermining the stated political goals of the work.

One participant noted that much “critical” research, stripped of jargon, says little more than what an ordinary person on the street already knows.

A structural reason was named too: researchers who try to publish in non-commercial, accessible feminist journals are warned by colleagues that doing so risks their job prospects so individual choices to write accessibly run directly against career incentives.

One participant noted that both academics and activists can fall into the trap of using their identity/label (“activist,” “academic”) as a way of gatekeeping who is allowed to understand or speak on an issue separating “us” who get it from “them” who don’t.

The suggestion was that academics, like activists, should aim to explain things in ways that prioritize being understood over being right or sounding sophisticated.

One researcher described consciously refusing the “produce, compete, produce” model by choosing, for example, to publish a book with a non-academic publisher, at real cost to her academic career as a way of staying true to her values despite the system pushing against it.

Another participant shared a parallel personal choice: leaving university teaching for high school teaching, for less pay and worse conditions, partly for self-preservation from academic pressure. She was honest that this kind of choice is easier for people with financial safety nets (family support, secure legal/residency status) and much harder for others naming this as a question of privilege, not just willpower.

Precarity isn’t unique to academia it runs through activism too

A participant who had worked with a state-funded minority-rights advocacy organization in France described a similar arguably more acute version of the same dynamic: the organization had to self-censor its language on racism to avoid losing government funding, and the funding had actually been pulled before as a consequence of speaking too openly.

This was offered as a reason some people end up choosing academia over activist work: it offers comparatively more stability and more freedom to publish, even if not in top-tier venues.

The broader point raised: academics are not separate from the world they study — like activists, they are “up against” the same systems, even while holding more structural power within them.

Closing exercise

The group was asked to each choose one word that captured what stuck with them from the discussion, to contribute toward a shared set of words: