doing impact?: creative and participatory methods of knowledge exchange
DESCRIPTION
A short presentation and workshop for PhD students at the University of Sussex exploring how doctoral research can have 'impact' beyond the academy. For more information about this project go to: http://goodsexproject.wordpress.com/TRANSCRIPT
Doing impact?: Creative and Participatory Methods of Knowledge Exchange
Ester McGeeney
Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth Studies (CIRCY),
University of Sussex
‘Good sex’?: Building evidence based practice in young people’s sexual health
ESRC knowledge exchange project: (June 2013 – June 2014)
What is ‘good sex’?: Young people, sexual pleasure and sexual health services
PhD research (February 2009 – June 2013)
Doing impact?: Creative and participatory methods of knowledge exchange
• Beyond the PhD. Can doctoral research have impact?
• What is ‘knowledge exchange’? What does a participatory and creative approach to KE look like?
• What’s the difference between ‘impact’ and ‘knowledge exchange’? Does it matter?
Beyond the PhD…
Using doctoral research to ‘do’ impact and communicate beyond the
academy
What is good sex?: Young people, sexual pleasure and sexual health services
16 individual interviews with young people (16-22)
4 focus groups with young people (16-22).
A survey of 278 young people aged 16 – 25.
+ A survey of 39 practitioners working with yp.
From research practice
• Developed a one day training course for practitioners on pleasure & trained 31 people.
• Created a series of films that reanimate PhD data in order to communicate with young audiences.
• Writing a review of the evidence on including pleasure in sexual health work with yp.
Knowledge transfer vs knowledge exchange
‘knowledge parcels for grateful recipients’
‘knowledge interaction’ & ‘messy engagement.’
(Davies et al (2008) Why 'knowledge transfer' is misconceived for applied social research, J Health Serv Res Policy 2008 13: 188)
)
Creative and participatory methods of knowledge exchange
Example 1: Reanimating dataExample 2: Delivering practitioner training
Example one, take one:Re-animating data
4 films that reanimate research data
Reanimating survey data
Good sex is….
Bad sex is…
‘Look out through the eyes of the person who is talking. You are looking out into the environment that you were imagining. What’s above you? Look down at your feet- look to one side and then to the other. What is the air like? Are you inside? Is it warm? Cool? What’s the quality of the air like?’
Reanimating interview data
Reanimating interview data: take 2
‘Tommy’ and ‘Indiah’
Doing impact or moments of knowledge exchange?
‘This is new to me. I wasn’t expecting to be acting in front of a camera. [E: Neither did we!] I liked it so much I’ve started to write short films and stuff. Watching it…I don’t know it feels weird. I just felt like, lets just go for it. I’m gonna miss this project.’
Example 2: Practitioner training
From doctoral research to practitioner training: moments of knowledge exchange
1) Here’s my research. Tell me about practice✗
2) Using films to deliver training ✗
3) Collecting together resources and experiences and collaborating with Brook education lead
✓4) Beyond Brook / the PhD / the academy. Co-creating and co-
facilitating ✓
From PhD – practitioner training course – doing impact?
• Developed a one day training course on how to talk to young people about sexual pleasure.
• Delivered the training to 31 practitioners from Brook & partner organisations.
• (Some) practitioners are disseminating / embedding learning in their teams and work with young people. Impact?
Having an impact‘J. loved the training and is
planning to deliver some of it to the rest of our team. She's also got us all reading the Dicktionary and Pussypedia - fascinating stuff. We're also hoping to add an anatomy zone to our Bitesize programme as inspired by your training :)’(Brook Service Manager)
‘We carried out a session called the amazing vagina and beyond and started with game Taboo (which they all participated in) I took a picture of all the vaginas - which were very impressive! and how much info they retained was fantastic. Feedback from the session was very positive too..’ (Brook educator)
Process or product? Impact or knowledge exchange?
What’s more important – the process of knowledge exchange that we engage in or the products that we produce as a result?
Q & A
• Practitioner training: could you turn your PhD into a training course? Why? For who?
• Reanimating data: what data would you reanimate it? How would you do this and why?
• Researcher in residence: where could you usefully be a resident? Who would this benefit? Isn’t this ethnography?