The social, historical, cultural and democratic context of civic engagement: imagining different communities and making them happen

The Imagine programme is a five-year project running from 2013 to 2017 which brings together a range of different research projects working together across universities and their, mostly local, communities. Using the new knowledge gathered, researchers from universities and community groups will together imagine how communities might be different. They will experiment with different forms of community building that ignite imagination about the future and help to build resilience and a momentum for change

However, Imagine will do more than just connect research on communities. At the heart of the programme is a vision to connect communities with research. Engagement with communities at all stages of the research places collaborative and participatory research methods in a central role to widen the ways community partners and universities can work together. The consortium is aiming for the ‘democratisation of social research’. And with such a big team the members of the consortium are having to work out precisely what this might look like in practice. Just to add to the complexity, some projects will be contesting the very notion of community itself.
Website: http://www.imaginecommunity.org.uk/