Co-operative research and research co-operatives

Offering a proposal for how the gap in discussions of co-operative Higher Education around research can be bridged, Swann suggests a broad framework for a research co-operative that would be able to provide an institutional framework for supporting and funding academic research. This chapter explores co-production as one approach to research that draws implicitly on core co-operative values, such as democracy, equality, equity and solidarity, and highlights the challenges faced in neoliberal Higher Education to co-produced research. Discussing a research co-operative as a potential response to these challenges, Swann touches on a number of existing examples of platforms that in one way or another mirror the functions we might want to see in a research co-operative. This chapter also identifies recent developments in platform co-operativism as of potential importance to making the idea of a research co-operative a reality in the short, medium and long term. At its heart is a democratization of epistemology.