The micro-politics of co-creation : augmenting analyses of ‘relational agency’ in local education partnerships with the ‘documentary conversation analysis’

Abstract

This paper outlines and assesses the value of a methodological framework to analyse both the micro-politics and the situated, relational learning of actors co-creating a common strategy in local education partnerships. Thereby, it draws on Edwards' concept of ‘relational agency’ and augments its analytical yield and focus with an amended version of the ‘documentary conversation analysis’ – a reconstructive methodology that is well established in Germany but much less known internationally. To assess its analytical value, the framework is then applied to a piece of micro-discursive data from a strategy-building process in a neighbourhood planning group within a German ‘educational landscapes’ project. Through shedding light onto (1) the co-created interplay of the actors' orientations, (2) the resulting outcomes and (3) the actors' micro-political strategies in gaining legitimacy, a differentiated picture emerges. The analysis yields fine-grained insights beyond commonly held local partnership assumptions, bringing to light how the actors individually and collectively struggle to cope with the contradictory tasks and contexts at hand. The paper concludes with highlighting the need to further address relational agency as a micro-political process, prefigured by the framing contexts and discourses.