Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
Luciann Blake (LSE) Aleena Numaan (The London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the 'insight' as a site of tension between anthropologists and their non-academic partners in a hospital redesign project in SW England. Epistemological differences on research outcomes and ethical differences around data sharing demonstrate the specific difficulties of such work
Paper long abstract:
Various epistemological and ethical conflicts between anthropologists and their non-academic partners can be brought together through an excavation of the term ‘insight’, increasingly used in public policy discourses to refer to the ostensibly discrete and replicable products of qualitative research. Beyond its colloquial meaning of a deep and accurate understanding of crucial information, the term often denotes legibility, applicability and discreteness. To explore this idiom, this paper draws on the authors’ experience in the South West of England contributing to a hospital redesign strategy that emphasises community-based co-production of new service design. The distinctive needs of the local area – marked by relative deprivation and a low-wage economy, both exacerbated by 18 months’ impact of Covid-19 – speak to medical anthropological concerns with the fundamentally social and structural dimensions of health and wellbeing. Our project established a novel advisory role that encompassed both research and consultation to inform future efforts in community outreach. In practice, our work as researchers was broadly better received than our initial advisory suggestions. In this paper we attribute this to epistemological differences regarding the outcomes and immediacy of research; and ethical differences regarding the sharing of said results across professional boundaries. Negotiated through references to insights, these differences became a site of productive but continual tension in our approach to applied research. This reflection on the demands of interdisciplinary partnership may contribute to the development of more appropriate translatory devices for medical anthropology.
Collaborating with non-academic partners in research: negotiating conceptual and ethical frameworks
Session 1 Wednesday 19 January, 2022, -