Community-led approaches to making fairer digital futures: researcher-in-residence as creative feminist methodology

Co-creation methodologies have proliferated across the arts, humanities and social sciences over recent decades as researchers, universities, funders, industry and policymakers seek to make research matter beyond the academy, sometimes with different priorities. However, such principles have long been central to feminist and other minoritarian practices attentive to questions of power, politics and ethics and invested in making better worlds. In this article, we argue that, understood as a creative feminist methodology, the Researcher in Residence (RiR) has much potential for exploring and supporting the imagination and building of fairer digital futures. We explore a RiR between a university researcher (Coleman) and arts centre and charity (KWMC) on developing community-led digital future-making. We suggest that future-making is an everyday practice, including how communities negotiate existing and make new technologies, but that it can be difficult to imagine and create futures that deviate from seemingly inevitable, corporate trajectories. We argue that a collaborative, creative, feminist RiR can produce a sensibility and approach that intervenes in business as usual and supports community-led digital future-making. In particular, we focus on how it can support experimentation that opens up seemingly closed practices while grounding them in particular situations, interests and desires.