Getting to the heart of the matter: deconstructing the notion of ‘co-production’ through collaborative autoethnography

This article tells a critically reflexive story in two parts. Part 1 focuses on an initiative during the Covid-19 pandemic to grow service user-led involvement in social work education. Part 2 focuses on the production of this article. Using collaborative autoethnography, we share our experiences of the development of an educational resource: ‘The Mental Self in Social Work Education and Practice’, designed to encourage critical self-reflection in thinking about mental health and distress, recognition of distress in the self and others, and to enhance capacity for self-care and support for colleagues and service users. Envisioning collaborative autoethnography as a form of co-production, we explore themes emerging from our reflections on the development of ‘The Mental Self’. Building on current critiques of co-production, a process implying equality, diversity, accessibility and reciprocity, we share our learning about the value of collaborative autoethnography in creating more egalitarian writing partnerships between people with lived experience of accessing services and academics without such experiences. Avoiding any romanticisation of co-production, we identify disruptive influences and those that support more equitable forms of knowledge production that can be used to disturb the superiority of the academy over the knowledges and skills of people accessing social work services.