The project

Imagine was a five year Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project funded through the Research Councils UK Connected Communities programme. It ran from 2013-2017.

On

Through Imagine, researchers from a range of disciplines worked with community partners to explore the changing nature of communities and community values over time, in their historical, cultural, democratic and social contexts.

The research foregrounded the importance of community development, community activism, and arts and humanities approaches to civic engagement. It had a particular focus on socially excluded communities.

The project emphasised the idea of ‘co-production’. Research was done collaboratively with communities rather than to them. This allowed academic and community researchers to experiment with different forms of community building that ignite imagination about the future and help to build resilience and a momentum for change.

Discover more about Imagine through our co-produced booklet (PDF, 2.76MB)

Read our submission of evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement (PDF, 345KB)

Work packages

Imagine was organised into four work packages, each focusing on a different context of civic engagement. Each work package involved a network of academics and community partners exploring a wide range of research questions using a variety of methodologies.

The social context - work package one

Coordinated by Angie Hart, Professor of Child, Family and Community Health at the University of Brighton.

Group photo of members of the project

This group looked at how community-university partnerships could bring people from very different backgrounds together to make better and more resilient collective futures.

The work package also involved community partners and academics from Crete, Sweden, England, Wales and Scotland, including Boingboing.

Together they explored how resilience-based approaches could help individuals and communities navigate stressful and challenging life situations while maintaining or developing their well-being.

The social context

The historical context - work package two

Coordinated by Sarah Banks, Professor in the School of Applied Social Sciences at Durham University.

Children play on swings in a vintage photograph from Hillfields

This work package was based in Tyneside (Benwell and North Shields) and Coventry (Hillfields). These areas were part of the first British anti-poverty programme, the National Community Development Project (CDP), in the 1970s.

This part of the Imagine project sought to produce snapshots of changing conditions and attitudes in these areas over time, from the different (and sometimes conflicting) perspectives of local people, community development workers, policy makers and politicians.

18 community-based organisations worked with academic staff from Durham and Warwick Universities to undertake creative projects.

The creative projects enabled reflection on the past, present and future of the areas, involving a range of people of different ages, ethnic and religious backgrounds.

The historical context

The cultural context - work package three

Coordinated by Kate Pahl, Professor in Literacies in Education at the University of Sheffield.

Park hill flats

This group worked with community partners to explore how arts practice can help communities to ‘imagine better futures’. It included collaborations with the Site Gallery, Sheffield, Museums Sheffield and the Hepworth, Wakefield.

Projects included

  • a revisiting of the modernist dream that is Park Hill Flats, using the timely moment of the redeveloped Park Hill to re-imagine the future through the lens of the past
  • a collaboration with the Hepworth Wakefield art gallery where local young people from a rent deposit scheme were invited to examine archives and use landscape art to explore their community’s past
  • a project based in Standford Hill Prison on the Isle of Sheppey, which explored the ways in which offenders imagine their post-release futures and how engaging in fictional work can help them to imagine alternative futures
  • a collaborative ethnographic project with women and girls in Rotherham, imagining better futures by inviting them to revisit histories with a focus on women’s activism and post-colonial literary texts

The cultural context

The democratic context - work package four

Coordinated by Paul Ward, Professor of Modern British History at the University of Huddersfield.

A collage about the past, present and future

This work package explored what the democratisation of knowledge about communities means in practice.

New forms of knowledge are emerging about communities and how they change. Opportunities are opening up for voices to be heard that have previously been marginalised.

Paul’s group was particularly interested in what community members think about how the future of their communities have been imagined. They were also interested in how new technologies are making it possible for these views to be expressed.

As well as looking at how visions of the future were created in past communities, work package four came to focus on issues of ethnicity in Britain. Ways in which different Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups have been excluded from national narratives came to form a central part of the research.

There are lessons here for our understanding of how some voices have been more prominent than others. We also learnt about how the imagination of better community futures requires activism and agency to ensure BAME inclusion in national narratives in the past, present and future. 

The democratic context

Community partners and collaborators

Related information

A global reputation

Sheffield is a research university with a global reputation for excellence. We're a member of the Russell Group: one of the 24 leading UK universities for research and teaching.

About the University