Partnership as an entangled space of becoming: Reflections on a collaborative journey

This essay reflects on our collaborative journey from 2019 through and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine our motivations for engaging in student-staff partnership (SSP) projectsandour evolving understandings of the joy and hope that collaborations can bring alongside the challenges we faced and/or observed. We are two former students and two staff members who met at Birmingham Newman University,a small English university underpinned by Catholic values of social justice, personal development, and the common good (Birmingham Newman University, 2020). Many students here commute, are mature, disabled, from low-participation neighbourhoods, and/or first-generation entrants (Birmingham Newman University, 2025).