The Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity (AFSEE) programme’s ‘Exploring the Potential of Academic-Practitioner Collaborations for Social Change (AcPrac)’ – project was launched in January 2022 to provide new insights on the potential of academic-practitioner collaborations for social change.
The AFSEE Programme envisions a future with robust alternatives to our current global economy and believes that equity can be achieved through bold, imaginative responses that are forged through collective action. Through projects like AcPrac, AFSEE is working on bringing together research, education and practice, and seeking to create dialogue and collaborations among a range of different stakeholders.
In the last couple of years, academics and practitioners involved in the AcPrac project have conducted research and produced publications to explore the conditions that are conducive to developing generative processes of knowledge exchange between academics and practitioners and examined the methodological and epistemological challenges of researching inequalities.
Over the past two decades collaborations between academics and practitioners have become more common. It is important to understand not only why collaborations emerge, but to what extent collaborations enable bringing in diverse voices and perspectives and address knowledge inequalities in research processes. Given AFSEE’s location at LSE, and our work of bringing together research, education, and practice, understanding the potential and challenges of collaborations between practitioners and academics is key to our programme’s work and theory of change.Professor Armine Ishkanian, AFSEE Executive Director
Highlights from the project so far include:
- Showcasing AFSEE Fellows’ experiences and reflections on academic-practitioner collaborations, thirteen papers written by Fellows have been published as part of the project AcPrac Case Studies series.
- Built on the experiences of the AFSEE Community, a brief guide was created by Tahnee Ooms and Barbara van Paassen to provide pointers for researchers and practitioners on how to better collaborate to advance social and economic equity.
- Based on research conducted as part of the AcPrac – project, a research paper and a blog were written by the project team to examine why academics and practitioners researching inequalities choose to collaborate and to what extent such collaborations have the potential to address knowledge inequalities in the research process.
- Aiming to investigate the funding landscape that drives academic-practitioner collaborations for social change, a sub-project was launched by Dr Aygen Kurt-Dickson. The sub-project has published a background report on funding policy and funders’ role in driving academic-practitioner collaborations.
The AcPrac project will continue to provide world-class research and resources on academic-practitioner collaborations, including publishing another round of AcPrac Case Studies in the next few years. In the new round, AFSEE will expand beyond academic-style papers to include creative storytelling formats such as photo essays, short films, and graphic animations.
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