The Empowerment of Pakistani Muslim Women Through Diverse Funds of Knowledge, Language, and Literacy Practices: A Study Undertaken in Rotherham Exploring English Language Learning from the 1980s to 2020

The research focuses on stories of Pakistani Muslim female English language learners and explores the women’s lived experience of learning the English language. The research also highlights the women’s own diverse funds of knowledge, language and literacy practices that give them agency and a strong Islamic and cultural identity as learners and as mothers. The study begins with the stories of a cohort of Pakistani women who attended English classes in the 1980s at a local community centre. The research offers a platform for marginalised women to represent themselves as English language learners, thus contributing to knowledge from the learner’s perspective, whose voices are often not heard in language and citizenship debates

Poetry as method – trying to see the world differently

Research with communities, even co-produced research with a commitment to social justice, can be limited by its expression in conventional disciplinary language and format. Vibrant, warm and sometimes complex encounters with community partners become contained through the gesture of representation. In this sense, ‘writing up’ can actually become a kind of slow violence towards participants, projects and ourselves. As a less conventional and containable form of expression, poetry offers an alternative to the power games of researching ‘on’ communities and writing it up. It is excessive in the sense that it goes beyond the cycles of reduction and representation, allowing the expression of subjective (and perhaps sometimes even contradictory) impressions from participants. In this co-written paper we explore poetry as a social research method through subjective testimony and in the light of our Connected Communities funded projects (‘Imagine’, Threads of Time and ‘Taking Yourself Seriously’ ) where poetry as method came to the fore as a way of hearing and representing voices differently

Co-producing research with communities: emotions in community research

In this article we explore the ways in which universities and communities can work together drawing on our experience of a community-university co-produced project called ‘Imagine’. We reflect on our different experiences of working together and affectively co-produce the article, drawing on a conversation we held together. We locate our discussion within the projects we worked on. We look at the experiences of working across community and university and affectively explore these. We explore the following key questions: How do we work with complexity and difference? Who holds the power in research? What kinds of methods surface hidden voices? How can we co-create equitable research spaces together? What did working together feel like? Our co-writing process surfaces some of these tensions and difficulties as we struggle to place our voices into an academic article. We surface more of our own tensions and voices and this has become one of the dominant experiences of doing co-produced research. We explore the mechanisms of co-production as being both a process of fusion but also its affective qualities. Our discussions show that community partners working with academics have to bear the emotional labour; by ‘standing in the gap’ they are having to move between community and university. We also recognise the power of community co-writing as a form that can open up an opportunity to speak differently, outside the constraining spaces of academia

Goldstraw, K,. Macmillan, A,. Mort, H,. Pahl, K., Pool, S., Rafiq, Z., Rasool, Z (2020) Co-Producing Artistic Approaches to Social Cohesion Research for All

This paper examines the potential of co-produced arts-based methodologies through the lens of a social cohesion project, from the perspectives of five artists. Arts methodologies can be useful in working across different disciplines and across university and community boundaries to create equitable knowledge production processes. The ways in which art is used in community settings as a mode of collaboration are explored, using the reflections from five artists who were involved in the social cohesion project together. This paper argues that co-producing artistic approaches to social cohesion is a complex, multilayered and sometimes fragile process, but that recognizing and discussing understandings of the role of power and voice within co-produced projects enables effective team communication

Social Frontiers and Community Life in Rotherham West. 'Life at the Frontier' Research Briefing 1

About the reportThis is Research Briefing 1 produced in project ‘Life at the Frontier: Researching the Impact of Social Frontiers on the Social Mobility and Integration of Migrants’ (2020-2023; project no 95193). Rotherham was selected as a qualitative case study where research was conducted by Dr Aneta Piekut (University of Sheffield), Dr Zanib Rasool (Rotherham United Community Trust), Dr Henry Staples (University of Sheffield), and prof. Gwilym Pryce (University of Sheffield). We conducted 34 individual in-depth interviews (23 residents and 11 experts) and 4 group interviews and feedback sessions. The aim of the research was to understand the role of so-called 'social frontiers' - when neighbouring communities are very different in terms of their cultural, ethnic and/or social make-up - for social mobility, community cohesion and residents lives.Research Briefing 1 is a community-facing report and covers the headline findings on the impacts on social frontiers on community life in Rotherham West ward, specifically: how physical barriers are reinforcing social frontiers, scarcity of social and community infrastructure, inter-group tensions related to the scarcity of infrastructure, the importance and limits of community leaders and a vibrant and initiative-taking community. The briefing outlines a few recommendations for local stakeholders.About the projectLATF project was funded by NordForsk and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), led by Prof. Gwilym Pryce. Research in Rotherham has also been supported by additional knowledge exchange and participatory research funding building on the LATF project: UKRI Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) funded ‘Blurring the edges: social frontiers as places of encounter' (2023, PI Piekut) and UKRI Research England funded 'Crossing the frontier: Exploring the potential of the Collective Mobile Method as a participatory research tool in Rotherham' (2024, PI Piekut).Research in Rotherham received ethical approval from the University of Sheffield Ethics Committee (no 042378).More information about the project is at the website: https://www.lifeatthefrontier.org/.</p