A guest blog from our Research Fellow, Jimmy Turner.
Sometimes in academia you find yourself working on a project that really captures your soul, and comes to feel less like work than it does a calling. I have been lucky enough to find myself working on such a project a few times in my fifteen-year academic career, and perhaps none exemplifies the phenomenon more clearly than our new publication, A Field Guide to Artist-Researcher Collaborations.
In my experience one of the common features of this kind of project is that the passion you feel for them, and the desire to attain some level of perfect-ish-ness, can lead them to take an awful lot longer than you had originally anticipated. It therefore came as no surprise that when we launched the field guide in early April 2026, it was over two years since we had begun working on the project.
When we in the Binks Hub team started the process of forming our Advisory Group nearly four years ago, none of us realised just how centrally involved in our work they would end up becoming. Their collective experience, wisdom and enthusiasm has enriched and expanded our work in a multitude of ways (see, for example, these blog posts on collaborations with Advisory Group members Marianna Hay, Catherine Maternowska, and Catherine-Rose Stocks-Rankin and Nel Coleman). One of the longest running of these collaborations began at the end of an Advisory Group meeting, held in an uninspiring windowless room, in late 2023.
One of the agenda points in the meeting had led to a lengthy discussion on the potential ways in which the Binks Hub could contribute to the training of academics on routes to generating policy impact, and the ideas that emerged during the discussion have gone on to inform many of our subsequent activities (including Binks Hub workshops at the 2024, 2025, and 2026 iterations of the University of Edinburgh’s ‘Impact Festival’, ongoing collaborations with Social Action Inquiry Scotland, and the policy work of the REALITIES Project).
It also sparked ideas for ways in which the Binks Hub might be able to inspire, support and train academic researchers in other areas, and the recently published A Field Guide for Artist-Researcher Collaborations is the fruit of one of these ideas.
The meeting had ended, and most people had left, but Advisory Group members Jean McEwan (a visual artist and frequent academic collaborator) and Susan Morrison (a comedian and writer, and founder of the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas) had fallen into a deep and animated conversation. They beckoned me over and asked if I thought that the Binks Hub would be interested in producing something that would help academic researchers to work in better and more ethical collaborations with artists and creative practitioners. I replied that we (by which I definitely really meant I) would be, and the next day I emailed our then Binks Hub colleague Rhiannon Bull to see if they might be interested too. Within a week the four of us met, and started the process of designing the project and drafting a proposal for the Binks Hub’s co-directors. They could not have been more enthusiastic, and generously allocated a budget with which we could pay the freelance members of our team and the other artists who we planned to invite to work with us. We had decided in early 2024 that the final output would be a ‘field guide’ which can be “used as a tool to aid exploration … particularly useful when exploring unfamiliar terrain, and it can be scrawled over and doodled in to reflect its owner’s own journey into new realms”.
We then recruited 18 other artists who had experience of collaborations with academics, and scheduled workshops in which we would generate the content. The Field Guide is then the product of twenty-two artists, creatives and researchers working together to identify the main challenges they face when seeking to work together, and offering guidance on how to navigate them. These include topics relate to:
- Fair pay
- Power structures
- Navigating one another’s worlds
- Mutual respect
- Communication
In the months following the workshops the four of us piloted some of the content at the International Creative Research Methods Conference, conferred with other artists, researchers, and artist/researchers, and began to draft the texts and design the creative interventions.
As is often the case with work which becomes a labour of love, this took us longer than we had anticipated, but by the summer of 2025 we had a full draft. Rhiannon and Jean then started on the aesthetic and visual design, a process which again took longer than we imagined it might, until finally, in the Spring of 2026, we were happy and ready to publish.
We were very lucky that the University of Edinburgh’s own Edinburgh Diamond agreed to publish it, which meant that we could offer it as an Open Access download for anyone who might be interested. Alongside the original version, our Binks Hub Advisory Group colleague Nel Coleman from the University of Edinburgh Library prepared a ‘lite’ version with greater accessibility and screen reader compatibility, and a booklet which gathers together all the creative interventions.
The field guide is designed to be of value to anyone interested in co-creative research practices, whether as a creative, researcher, student, or interested bystander. You can read it cover to cover, or sample only the knowledge you need. We just hope it helps you to navigate these relationships with greater ease, effectiveness, and empathy!
