Regulating for care-ful knowledge production: Researching older people, isolation and loneliness.

Collaborative, co-produced research is positioned as increasingly essential to the university in delivering public good and in finding answers to the increasingly ‘wicked’ problems we face as social researchers (Facer and Enright, 2016). Important questions need to be asked concerning how far current regulatory norms and practices around research maximize insights and the realization of transformative change. In the UK at least, despite the prominence of ‘co-production’ in Higher Education funding strategies, the balance in research funding remains weighted toward research in which problems and interests are identified from within the academic community. This chapter tells the story of a research project that aimed to develop more equitable and inclusive ‘regulatory systems’ around the production of knowledge concerning the isolation and loneliness of older people. As such this is a chapter about the regulation in and of research programmes and is intended to highlight the way that ‘top down’ regulation, embedded in university ethical processes, funder requirements and forms of accountability around research create particular relations between universities and publics. This article draws attention to alternative regulatory systems for knowledge production emerging from our coproduced research process that draws particularly on feminist concerns centred on an ethic of care.