Co-production for or against the university: student loneliness and the commodification of impact in Covid-19

PURPOSE: This paper explores the dissonance between co-production and expectations of impact in a research project on student loneliness over the 2019/2020 academic year. Specific characteristics of the project - the subject matter, interpolation of a global respiratory pandemic, informal systems of care that arose among students, and role of the university in providing the context and funding for the research - brought co-production into heightened tension with the instrumentalisation of project outputs. STUDY DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Our project consisted of a series of workshops, research meetings, and mixed-methods online journalling between 2019-2020. This paper is primarily a critical reflection on that research, based on observations by and conversations between the authors, together with discourse analysis of research data. FINDINGS: We argue that co-producing research with students on university contexts elevates existing tensions between co-production and institutional valuations of impact; that co-production with students who had experienced loneliness made necessary space for otherwise absent support and care; that our responsibility to advocate for our evidence and co-researchers came into friction with how the university felt our research could be useful; and that each of these converging considerations are interconnected symptoms of the ongoing marketisation of HE. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: This paper provides a novel analysis of co-production, impact, and higher education in the context of an original research project with specific challenges and constraints. It is a valuable contribution to methodological literatures on co-production, multidisciplinary research into student loneliness, and reflexive work on the difficult uses of evidence in university contexts.