%0 Journal Article %T The ‘co’ in co-production: Museums, community participation and Science and Technology Studies %A Helen Graham %D 2016 %V Special Issue: Science Museums and Research %N Spring 2016 %X %Z The language used here is drawn from Theodor Adorno’s ‘Valéry Proust Museum’ (Adorno 1967 [1988], p 180). Adorno uses it as part of his glossing of Valéry’s account of museums and has been taken up in numerous accounts of museums since, both in accordance with Adorno’s account of Valéry and also as a way of suggesting alternatives to both Valéry and Proust’s sensory flâneur, which is, of course, also the purpose of Adorno’s article (e.g. Whitcomb 2003). Although I don’t have space to explore Adorno’s argument in this piece, you could say the argument I’m making here is to explore an alternative to either of the object-subject relations Adorno ascribes to Valéry and Proust as well as the one of ‘deadly seriousness’ he ultimately claims for himself (1967 [1988], p 185). %Z The idea of co-production was then developed further by Edgar Cahn, a lawyer working on civic and human rights in the US in the late 1990s and 2000s. One of Cahn’s concerns was to see co-production not simply as it relates to public services, such as policing or education, but to extend the idea to the economy more generally as a way of imagining ‘a partnership between the monetary economy (comprised of public, private and nonprofit sectors) and the core economy of home, family, neighbourhood, community and civil society’ (Cahn, 2004; Stephens, Collins and Boyle, 2008). %Z Tony Bennett has since updated the concept as a ‘culture complex’ to ‘encompass the roles played by a broader range of knowledge practices and institutions in the governance of conduct’ (2013, p 25). %Z Following a 2013 special issue in the Social Studies of Science – titled ‘A Turn to Ontology in Science and Technology Studies?’, the last few years have seen a debate in STS about whether ‘ontology’ is a useful descriptor. Stephan Woolgar and Javier Lezaun argue that ‘the degree to which a term like “ontology”, which originally describes a particular mode of investigation, comes to designate and demarcate a domain of reality to be explored. This bifurcation does not necessarily imply two increasingly diverging agendas, but rather describes a tension built into our analytical sensibilities (2015, pp 465–6). They go on, ‘For us, the turn to ontology implies a widening of scope – a looking around rather than towards – and a degree of circumspection about our ability to make objective determinations of reality. A turn to ontology should press difficulty, hindering reification by raising the bar in terms of how quickly or easily we make assumptions about reality. Raising the bar, in other words, in terms of how easily we are willing to leave out the question mark (2015, p 466). %Z The dangers of the practice of holding community groups at arm’s length under a pretense of public benefit was a key finding of a recent collaborative research I was involved in. See, ‘How should heritage decisions be made?’ (2013–2015): http://heritagedecisions.leeds.ac.uk/ %Z An inspiring example of how to develop ‘more than human participatory research’ and especially how to develop conversations with water can be read here (Bastian et al, online): http://www.morethanhumanresearch.com/conversations-with-the-elements.html %I The Science Museum Group %@ 2054-5770 %B eng %U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/the-co-in-co-production/ %J Science Museum Group Journal