What’s in a hyphen? Insights from the field on co-production as methodology

Drawing on our study of refugee women’s urban mobilities, we examine the mechanisms and infrastructure of arts-based co-production in geography. While co-productive approaches are often celebrated for their transformative potential, we interrogate this promise through a series of workshops culminating in a co-produced film with nine women who received bicycles through the charity, The Bike Project. We ask how the ‘co’ in co-production may obscure hierarchies of power and explore what the hyphen’s implied horizontality reveals. By engaging with divergent research temporalities and underexamined aspects of co-production, we reveal how embedded asymmetries among actors shape both the process and its outcomes in complex ways. We evidence how the gap between formal ethical guidelines, the way we write research and meaningful ethics in practice limit co-production’s potential and advance emotional value as an undervalued outcome of the approach. We conclude that research at the intersection of geography, migration studies, creative practice and lived experience may produce both emotional and productive value, especially in the afterlives of the project when broader geographies of precarity, institutional constraint and uneven collaboration are meaningfully addressed.