IATL employs a team of four Co-creation Officers to support and advocate for co-creation in IATL and more widely. IATL’s Co-creation Officers are students from across the University, and all have experience of working with IATL, whether as students on our modules, recipients of funding, or with ICUR and Reinvention. Incoming Cocreation officers are supported and mentored by students who have been in the role for longer, passing on and developing important institutional knowledge and practices that they've developed in the role.

Co-creation Officers work closely with colleagues as ‘expert co-creators’ within the department, and more widely within the university, developing and supporting practices of co-creation in different contexts and sharing their perspectives as students; something inherent to the work IATL does as a department. They are available to discuss practices of co-creation between staff and students and to support the projects and work within the department. They bring valuable experience and expertise to considering how co-creation works in diverse contexts, and work both on projects which focus on co-creation explicitly, and which are underpinned by or seek to develop practices of co-creation.

How we apply co-creation in IATL by Lily-Rose Fitzmaurice

In IATL we seek to support co-creative practice that aims to cultivate co-creative partnerships. We believe that co-creation should aim for the kind of equality and reciprocity that Cook-Sather et al articulate, but also recognize that it is necessary to name where power is situated within a collaborative practice and how this can impede on the process of an equal partnership, in order to try and mitigate the consequences of this inequality and support a practice based in humanizing one another beyond academic status. Equally, it is critical to note that imbalanced power structures exist beyond the student-staff contradiction within Higher Education. For example, inequality can exist between staff with staff, as well as between students, through factors such as age, gender, race, class, and ethnicity. Thus, as co-creation often emphasizes the power imbalance between students with staff, it is important that we do not homogenize these bodies as experiences of power and disempowerment will be as diverse as the individuals within these groups.

The full article written by Lily-Rose Fitzmaurice (one of IATL's student co-creation officers) is available hereLink opens in a new window