Multiple Players and a Few Ground Rules: The creative dissemination of other authors' research

This paper offers a reflexive account of a specific instance of knowledge transfer undertaken in a multi-ethnic area of Cardiff by media and cultural studies researchers. This project entailed collaborative primary work with 2 community-based organisations and secondary work with a high-profile NGO (Oxfam Wales) in delivering the findings of an Oxfam-commissioned research report onto the management of poverty in diverse Welsh communities. The project was supported by a cross-HEI Strategic Insight Partnerships fund that aims to facilitate strategic placements into business partner organisations; the key benefit and main driver being 'the transfer of knowledge and cultural understanding on a mutually beneficial basis'. This paper examines the applicability of creative methods in the field and, unusually, considers their value not in the process of generating new research (see, for example, Gauntlett 2007) but in creatively delivering back research findings to the communities where they have been generated. Such an impulse to hold social science research to account (pioneered by feminist critiques, in particular) raises substantial ethical and pragmatic questions made all the more complex in the context of multi-partner collaborations between academics, community and lobbying organisations. The value of creativity to such diverse partners, and more importantly to the residents of these communities, reveals the diverse understanding of what creativity is for, how it is experienced and why it matters. The capacity of creative methods to exploit the sensuous, the visual and the tactile in generating forms of conviviality and reflection is thus set alongside the wider political context in which this project took place, namely the increasing prominence of a rhetoric and policy of creative industry in the public sphere.