3-5 November 2025, Roskilde University – PhD School for Communication and Arts
Course teachers
Tineke Abma is Professor of Participation of Older People at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Leiden University, Professor of Arts and Health at Erasmus University and Executive-Director of Leyden Academy of Vitality and Ageing. Tineke carries out research revolving around patient participation, participatory action research, ethics, diversity and the arts in healthcare in order to enhance the social inclusion of (older) people. She has authored books such as Evaluation for a Caring Society (IAP Press, 2018) and Participatory Research for Health and Social Well-Being (Springer Nature, 2019). She is a member of the steering committee on Arts in Health Netherlands and is currently editing a Special Issue on ‘Navigating back-stage processes in participatory action research’ for the International Journal of Qualitative Methods.
Website: https://www.theartofbelonging.nl/;; https://www.leydenacademy.nl/tineke-abma/ https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/tineke-abma#tab-1
Victoria Foster is Associate Head of History, Geography and Social Sciences, Director of the Centre for Social Responsibility at Edge Hill University and Visiting Professor of Community-Engaged Scholarship at the University of Central Florida. Victoria works collaboratively with local government, organisations and marginalised communities, studying social justice issues, including environmental concerns, and providing critiques of policy initiatives. She has a particular interest in arts-based methodologies underpinned by feminist epistemology and her book, Collaborative Arts-based Research for Social Justice (Routledge, 2015), provides a rationale for employing this approach in community settings. She is currently the UK PI on the Trans-Atlantic Platform project, Exploring the Role of Adaptive Capacity on Democratic Performance.
Website: https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/person/dr-victoria-foster/staff/
Louise Phillips is Professor of Communication and head of the Research Group on Dialogic Communication at Roskilde University. Louise’s research focuses on collaborative, dialogic and participatory approaches to communicating and producing knowledge in participatory health and social research and arts, health and wellbeing. In her new book, Embracing the messy complexities of co-creation: A dialogic approach to participatory qualitative inquiry (Routledge, 2025), she presents a distinctive constructive and critical approach to co-creation which brings participatory research into dialogue with social constructionist, poststructuralist, posthumanist and new materialist strands of qualitative inquiry.
Website: https://forskning.ruc.dk/da/persons/louisep
Course description
The course is designed for PhD students who are engaged in co-creation in participatory research in any field or topic area across the humanities and social sciences. We understand participatory research as a heterogeneous terrain embracing different kinds of Action Research and other research currents in which processes of “co-creation” are central. Key principles across the approaches include respect, equity and inclusion, active learning, democratic participation, collective action, making a difference and personal integrity. According to the principles of participatory research, academic researchers and people with personal experience of the topic under study – for example, as health or social service users, community members or professionals – co-create knowledge through dialogue across difference. Often, arts-based research methodologies are used in order to elicit experiential, embodied, affective and aesthetic ways of knowing, in line with the participatory ideal of democratising knowledge production and goals of social transformation and justice. However, co-creation in participatory research is fraught with tensions which arise in the disconnect between the alluring, seductive promise of dialogue with respect to transformative social change and its messy complexities in practice. The course will home in on the tensions and address the following tricky questions:
- What does the “co” in “co-creation” consist of in practice? *What is the role of the participatory researcher, and how is control over the research process shared by co-researchers and researchers?
- How does power come into play in dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in co-creation across different ways of knowing and with what consequences for the co-created knowledge and the scope for action of the different participants?
- How can we work in PhD projects with relational ethics of care, theories of co-creation and arts-based participatory methodologies in critical, reflexive ways that attend to power dynamics in the sociopolitical and organisational contexts in which co-creation takes place?
- How can we integrate analyses of the tensions arising from dynamics of inclusion and exclusion into the research process to generate knowledge about the potentials and challenges of co-creation and as a foundation for a relational research ethics?
The aim of the course is to support participants’ PhD projects by presenting critical and constructive approaches to the complexities of co-creation across multiple stakeholders, knowledge forms and knowledge interests. We will bring participatory research into dialogue with poststructuralist, social constructionist and new materialist, posthumanist strands of qualitative inquiry. This will involve exploring ways of working across participatory research, with its critical focus on power in the service of goals of social justice and social change and current seams of qualitative and post-qualitative inquiry, with their new materialist, posthumanist focus on performative world-making and the embodied, creative and playful. Across the course, we will work with the interplay between metatheoretical assumptions, relational ethics, theory, arts-based, creative methodologies and methods, empirical material and practice. Drawing on many years of experience in, and in-depth knowledge of, participatory inquiry, the course teachers will offer many practical examples.
The course will be organised along interactive, dialogic lines as a space for collaborative learning with a combination of teacher presentations, workshops, group discussions of texts and PhD project feedback sessions.
Registration and preparation
Registration with motivated application: here
Registration deadline: 25 August 2025
ECTS: 5
Price: If you are NOT a member of the open PhD market, the price is DKK 1200 per ECTS. If you are in doubt as to whether you are a member of the open PhD market, please contact your institute/faculty/organisation.
To register for the course, please submit a max. 1 page motivated application (state where you are in your PhD process including previous or current experience of qualitative and participatory methodologies and why you think this course is relevant for you). We will inform you about whether you have gained a place on the course by 4 September.
As preparation, please submit a 12-page “work-in-progress” paper in English by 30 September with the following content:
a) motivation to attend the course: what you want to learn and how you hope the course will help you in your research project
b) an outline of the research question(s), theory and participatory research design of your PhD project
c) a description of ongoing research practices (what you are engaged in at the current stage)
d) a description of challenges, ambivalences, doubts and dilemmas which you would like input into how to grapple with
In addition, all participants should read a collection of course readings (approx. 240 pages) prior to the course. We will make the course readings available by 12 September and a detailed course programme by 3 October.
In the PhD project feedback sessions, you will be assigned to a group of six participants and one course teacher. As preparation, you should read the papers of all the participants in your group prior to the course and prepare detailed feedback on one of the papers.
You are welcome to contact the course coordinator, Louise Phillips (louisep@ruc.dk), if you would like more information about the course.