To attend this workshop please book on Inkpath. Inkpath is an app available to all Techne students, if you're not already using please click here to find out how to get started.

This workshop has two sessions: 11am to 1pm on 21st & 22nd March. You should plan to attend both sessions. 

In the course of their research, many PhD scholars work with a range of individuals and communities who bring their own complicated, nuanced relationships with institutions, academic and otherwise, to the exchange. This training will focus on ethical and collaborative interview and research methods that focuses on the specifics of data collection and ongoing, participant informed consent.

By the end of this two-day course, participants will have considered:

1. How to develop positive and productive relationships with intermediaries who may act as ‘gatekeepers’ between researchers and research communities.

2. How to set up, conduct and evaluate participant interviews and projects in a manner that is ethical, trauma aware and consent based.

3. How to adopt, monitor and adapt an ongoing practice of ‘informed consent’ throughout the research process and up to publication.

4. How to acknowledge, evaluate and contend with practical limitations in research (language barriers, unknown interpreters, cultural challenges etc.)

This training will be delivered by Dr Jade Lee, Director of Aurora Learning, and Dr Harriet Barratt who will be specifically drawing on her experiences as a Senior Research Associate at York St. John where she led a two-year research and evaluation project in collaboration with Northumbria University for the 'Converge' programme which connected people with experience of mental ill health with free arts education. 

This training is open to all Techne students who think they will find it helpful but, is particularly targeted at early (first or second year) PhD students whose practice-based research focuses specifically on gathering material (whether interviews, life stories or narrative/art-based work) from a participant group.

A growing number of PhD students and Early Career Researchers have shown interest in pursuing research with and for communities who have traditionally been viewed from an abstract distance if, indeed, they have been viewed at all. The scope of these projects is wide and includes researchers working with women in domestic violence refuges, teenagers in socio-economically deprived areas of London and Afghani refugee communities caught in the limbo of the Aegean islands.

What these projects all have in common is that they bring academic scholars into contact with individuals and communities that are likely to have experienced trauma as well as disempowering if not explicitly violent interactions with institutional and state authorities. High levels of professional and personal sensitivity and ethics are essential if the researcher is to avoid replicating the participants’ experiences of marginalisation and creating an abstract rather than rich, nuanced picture of their lives and experiences.

This is a two part webinar series delivered by Fred Ehresmann, Senior Lecturer in Mental Health at the University of the West of England and Dr Jade Lee, director of Aurora Learning and UK Programme Lead of School Bus Project, an NGO that supports educational programmes for young refugees in Europe.

By the end of the webinars, participants will:

• Have an introductory understanding of the psychological and physiological impact of chronic trauma on the individual.

• Have an understanding of ‘Trauma Informed Care’ and why it is an integral part of working respectfully and ethically with traumatized populations.

• Have considered the importance of informed consent and what this looks like practically in unstable environments.

• Have practical strategies for conducting research interviews in a sensitive, ethical, and trauma-informed manner.

• Have explored their own position as researchers and individuals within a broader social context and the expectations and preconceptions they bring to the interaction.

• Considered the importance of safeguarding their own mental wellbeing in the research context and practical ways of doing so.

This training is open to all Arts and Humanities PhD scholars regardless of funding status.

Tickets available at Eventbrite.

Building Humanitarian Networks and Community Resilience in the Era of Social Distancing

Open to doctoral researchers at all CHASE institutions. Register via the events page.