The social life of HOMAGO

Over the past twenty years, attention has turned to the importance of interdisciplinary, collatborative research across the humanities and social sciences, including the need to address questions of relevance of outside of academia. This has created new questions around the commodification of knowledge and the ways in which value is being defined and redefine across inreasingly intertwined institutional contexts, whether value is articulated through ‘impact’ and ‘partnership’ agendas in the university sector (Allen 2014; Bastow, Dunleavy and Tinkler 2014; Oliver 2014), or through a generalized focus upon ‘applied’ research in a resource-constrained funding environment. Yet, as the introduction to this volume suggests, we have few published examples of the ways in which these kinds of collaborations with partners outside of academia play out in practice or of some of the consequences of such colalborations for understanding the value of academic knowledge. This chapter focuses upon and example of how research findings can be taken up in practice-based settings. It explores the case study of HOMAGO, a learning concept and theory that emerged out of the findings of a three-year investigation into innovative knowledge cultures, tracing the concept’s transfromation from a collective research finding to a learning ‘theory’ and ‘principle’ for guiding out-of-school curriculum, professional development and learning spaces in the field of education.