(S6E4) Rethinking Research Spaces: Developing a Medical Humanities Lab and Redefining Research Practices

Emma Spary:

Hi, It's Emma. And as a quick introduction, I lead the researcher, development and culture team at the University of Leeds. My podcast episodes focus on areas of research leadership and research culture, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Claire Barker and Professor Amelia DeFalco from the University of Leeds. And we're going to be talking about a project that they're working on that really puts the end users of the research at the core of the project and introduces us to a non hierarchical leadership model. Anne introduces us to a non hierarchical leadership model.

Emma Spary:

So do you just want to say hello?

Clare Barker:

Hello.

Amelia DeFalco:

Brilliant.

Emma Spary:

Thank you. So we're here today to talk about the Living Bodies Objects project, which is a three year project funded by the welcome Trust, and it's designed to test and extend the boundaries of medical humanities research. Now, that sounds great, but actually for our listeners, could you just give us a brief summary of the project and its aims?

Clare Barker:

Yeah, of course. So this project is funded by a welcome Research Development Award, and these awards are quite unusual awards because they're about establishing the foundations for work that's going to take risks and shape the future directions of research before research questions are developed. So it's a project that's really about the stages before the research ideas take shape. So our project is focused on developing a medical humanities lab, and the lab itself is the project. The project is about the development of the lab and what that means. So what might a medical humanities lab space look like? How might it work on a daily basis? What kind of research might we produce in this idea of the lab? We're working with Creative Partners, an organization called Immersive Networks, who are experts in all kinds of technologies and who specialize in kind of translating complex ideas into accessible formats using technology. So we're working along with them, and we're working with four other partner organizations who are each going to join us for a six month residency period in the lab. And over the course of each residency, we're developing our ideas and research questions for the work that we're doing with each organization.

Clare Barker:

So it's unusual in that welcome is less interested in us producing particular outputs than they are in us exploring how we might conduct our research. So we're experimenting with the idea of the lab and how research might take place within the lab. And there's a big emphasis on equality and inclusion and on the career development of everyone involved in the project. So we're thinking throughout the project, as we develop the lab, we're thinking about how we might develop a more inclusive and collaborative research culture and make our lab space part of that research culture. Our four partner organizations all serve communities that are disability communities or communities who experience health inequalities. And so we've been thinking a lot about creating safe and inclusive spaces for research, closing the gap between researchers and those people who are researched as the subjects of research. We're thinking about the history of the lab as a space that might not be inclusive, indeed, where spaces that have done harm to people's health and bodies as well. So it's a project that is very exploratory the space for us to take risks and possibly make mistakes.

Clare Barker:

And it's a real privilege to be able to work on a project where we get to explore how research is done.

Emma Spary:

So one of the interesting things about this and you've just touched on it is that exploratory nature. And I know you've taken the approach of a non hierarchical model of leadership. Can you just explain what that looks like and why you felt that was important for this type of project?

Amelia DeFalco:

Thanks, Emma. So what it looks like is that we have five Co-PIs rather than a pi and one pi and multiple co eyes. And what that means, though, in practice has proved more sometimes trickier than we expected. But we have kind of found our way through trial and error. And the leadership, I guess we use a rolling model of leadership. So because the project is organized around a series of residencies, different team members have different levels of responsibility as we move between residencies. So we have kind of one leader assigned to particular residencies and then it will shift. The residencies are the focal point for the research.

Amelia DeFalco:

But as we'll discuss research, culture is paramount in everything that we do, is kind of examining and examining research color and culture rather, and being really focused about how we do what we do and why. So there are different leads on different aspects of the project, as Claire was discussing. The project is really about exploring how we do the research that we do and why we do it and not taking anything for granted. So even the very structure of the project we wanted to examine and not take for granted, for example, that you would have a sole leader who was responsible for the duration, et cetera. And a big part of the project is working towards alternative structures that as much as possible, if not dismantled, and at least are self consciously engaging with power and the way that it can register throughout a project. So part of that is seeking this more devolved power structure that comes with its challenges because obviously, in a more conventional project, there is a clear leader not on every aspect, but one person that is ultimately responsible. And so we have to spend a lot more time clarifying roles and responsibilities on a regular basis. And so that's something that we've come to realize and that we are doing on a regular basis.

Amelia DeFalco:

And big part of the project has been realizing how much time it takes to do things differently because the models aren't there and we have to develop them. So it's a slow process, but overall it's quite a fruitful process.

Clare Barker:

Yeah, I just like to add to that that we're also thinking about the kind of structures and institutional support for research as well on the project and how we can integrate our work kind of more thoroughly into that. So one of our co principal investigators is Faye Robinson, who's the university head of research development. And by having Faye as a researcher on the project and not just somebody who supports the process of research, it means that we can connect up with the university research initiatives and research culture work and try and find all the ways that we can to be integrated in what's happening in the wider culture of research as well. And I think one of the things that we're doing also is reflecting a lot on what we're doing and on the processes that we're involved in and what works well and what doesn't. So that we're kind of developing a better sense of what works well and what doesn't work well. And one of the benefits, I think, of having a non hierarchical leadership model is that we can think about people's kind of personal aspirations and career development in a more holistic way, so people can say, well, I'm really interested in this aspect of the project, so could I take a lead on this activity? Or we want to spend some time working together on this. So can we manage our workloads and our responsibilities for this next period around allowing people to do some of the things that they want to do? So it does create more flexibility in that way for people to be involved in and to lead on the things that they most want to work on. Although it does take, like Amelia said, a lot more time to work all that out and to work out how we're going to do what we're doing and how everybody fits together at any point in time.

Emma Spary:

Another area that I've picked out that I was really keen to explore is around the focus that you have on equity, diversity, and inclusion. So can you tell us a bit.

Amelia DeFalco:

More about that, the equality, diversity, and inclusion? Our approach has been to investigate those concepts as much as ploy them. So, as I was saying, the technique we have with EDI is to investigate the terms rather than simply employ them in any straightforward way. So a lot of what we're doing is basically employing critique as a method to develop a model of working that we understand as being, quote, beyond EDI and to develop approaches that actually investigate what, as we talked about before, non hierarchical ways of working might be that are fundamentally based on accessibility and care and accountability. As we'll discuss, we can discuss later. As we've discovered, those are our key project values. And so towards that aim, we've been thinking about how we do. I keep stressing that because that's really, to me, what the project is largely about is kind of investigating the how of research. As much as we're doing research, we're reflecting on the processes that go into that are often taken for granted and to make explicit some of the things that tend to just go by as a given.

Amelia DeFalco:

And so as part of that process, we've been developing different documents that guide our research. And so our key documents are the ways of working that we've developed over the course of the project. And we use that as a guide to work in ways that we believe are ethically informed and express a degree of accountability and care towards one another, the team itself and towards our partners and our participants of any kind. And part of that is kind of critiquing conventional approaches to EDI and areas that they might fall short or areas where they might be co opted by kind of institutional frameworks, et cetera, and used in tokenistic or superficial ways. And so, as with everything we have done, it takes a lot of time because it means that we have to talk things through, work them through and decide really where our priorities lie in a way that isn't taking anything for granted. So we've developed, as I mentioned, the ways of working as well as a project glossary, which has been a really key tool because that allows us to do that work. I mentioned about investigating key concepts that get tossed around all the time in EDI conversations, whether they're those key terms of equality, diversity, inclusion, but other and related terms and how do we understand those, what do they really mean in practice and are they basically doing the work that we want them to do? And might there be other terms that we find to be more useful and a more accurate reflection of our ethical commitments to one another?

Clare Barker:

I think it's also worth mentioning that this is a medical humanities project and several of us on the team have a background in disability studies. So one of our starting points when thinking about equality and inclusion was a certain set of concerns about academic research culture in relation to health and relation to disability as well. So we all know that research culture can produce stress and anxiety, a culture of overwork, often isolation, things like that. Welcome produced a report on research culture a little while ago that confirmed all these things as well. So there's the actual kind of health and well being impacts of doing research. And we're interested in alternative ways of conducting research that might actively try to resist that kind of research culture that's based around productivity, over, work stress, all these kind of things, competition that kind of generates these health effects. We're also very aware of the ways in which academia demands certain kinds of able bodiedness and able mindedness as well. The way that academic work privileges certain qualities, things like independence, rationality productivity, coherence that might not always be compatible with disabled people's support needs or energy levels or communication styles or cognitive processes, things like that.

Clare Barker:

So what gets celebrated is excellent research often demands certain kinds of prowess that are not accessible to everyone all of the time and that can perpetuate those problematic standards like overwork being kind of accepted as a norm. So we're interested in our research how we might find strategies to centralize things that are important within disability studies. So ideas of care. Like Amelia said, embodiment, thinking of ourselves and our partners as people with bodies and minds that have needs and energy levels and things vulnerability, alternative temporalities that might include things like pausing or pacing or resting as an integral part of how we manage our energy across the project, how we look after each other, how we avoid burnout and things like that. So we're thinking about EDI with a real emphasis on health, although not limited to health, and so thinking more critically about the embodied processes of doing research as well as the actual research that we're doing.

Emma Spary:

Thank you. And Claire mentioned there, the Wellcome Trust study. So we will drop a link into the show notes for this episode. I just want to take you back to the ways of working agreement and the project glossary because they sound really interesting, but how does it work in practice and how do you even start to create these?

Clare Barker:

Yeah, it was quite difficult, actually, to think about how you approach starting this kind of work. When we wrote the application for the funding, we had a list of things that we promised that we would do. We said we would create a safer spaces agreement. We said that we think about accessibility and the events that we put on and the things that we produce. There were certain kind of things we started from, so we started looking at good practice. We looked at a lot of safer Spaces agreements that other project teams and labs had developed, other organizations. We looked at other labs and their kind of EDI work. A real influence was the Clear Lab, which is based in Canada and has wonderful lab book that's available online and videos about how they do certain things.

Clare Barker:

And they're really committed to anti colonial and feminist work, and they've got some brilliant strategies. And so we've experimented with some good practice that we've found in other spaces as well. But our ways of Working Agreement, it's developed gradually over time. We've had regular meetings where we've discussed it and thought about what is emerging as being important to this project. And we've recently put the first kind of public facing version of this on our website, but we're fully expecting it's going to change again over time. So it's very much a living document. It's something that is a work in progress we're developing as we go along and as we learn more on the project. It's got a series of principles and commitments that are in some ways aspirational we don't always manage to achieve everything that we've put into our ways of working agreement, but we're using it as a guidance.

Clare Barker:

That's what we're aiming for. So things like accessibility comes first. We create safe spaces, we work with care, these kind of commitments, commitments to understanding our own and each other's kind of workloads, and thinking with care about how we manage that, how we interact with each other and with our partners. The ways of working agreement, in some ways, it's the tip of the iceberg of the work that we've done because it kind of states the principles and commitments. But we've also thought about strategies for developing those things. So we've thought very carefully about, for example, how we welcome people into our lab space, how we make people feel comfortable in research spaces if they're not professional researchers, how we address power relationships in the encounters that we have with people we're working with on the project, that kind of thing. So we've been experimenting with all these different kind of strategies. We've been thinking about different modes of facilitation, for example, and thinking about the ways that we use our space as well.

Clare Barker:

I think one of the things that's been interesting about the project is that we had started off with the idea of the lab as a space and we do have a physical space for the lab. We've got some rooms in the Health Sciences Library and we've got our creative partners are developing a virtual lab space as well. And again, we're thinking about accessibility, making the virtual space kind of accessible to a whole range of different kinds of people who may not be academic in any kind of way, thinking about what will make these spaces attractive and help people to become engaged and be interested in the work that we're doing. But over time, we've kind of realized that our lab has to be very flexible and mobile. Sometimes it means going into work in other people's spaces when that's what's most comfortable and familiar to them. So that kind of thing. So yeah, the ways of Working agreement is kind of an accumulation of this learning across the project, really, and the kind of principles and commitments that come out of that and alongside it with thinking about the strategies and ways of implementing it. And the glossary started off really as a way of it started off as a space of organizing reading that we were doing.

Clare Barker:

We were doing a lot of reading around EDI kind of work and kind of started to put together this list of terms and definitions and concepts and things that we might find useful in the project. And it's really become quite central to what we do and it's become something that's kind of a space for dialogue and reflection and all kinds of things. It's a space where we share the reading that we've been doing. So we have quotations and definitions and things from the academic reading that we've been doing in there. We have examples of good practice that we've found from other projects and other organizations and then we have people add in their own reflections on oh, we did something in the lab last week and this really made me think about this concept and this is how it's making me think about it. So it's a space for sharing our thoughts, really deepening our understanding of relevant concepts and approaches. It's a space for reflection provocation. So we've got a version of this on our website as well and that's the kind of the first public version of it.

Clare Barker:

But we also have a longer, much messier version that we're still kind of working with and we'll update it as we go along as well. And I think part of the point of it really is that it's messy and unfinished, a space for following thought processes, making connections between things, kind of engaging in dialogue with each other and with academic and non academic work around EDI concepts as we go. Yeah, it's a kind of space for thought and development of ideas really and it's proved to be really useful so far.

Emma Spary:

Thank you and again, we will drop all of the links to the Clear Lab and also to your website so people can find this glossary in whatever format it's currently in into the show notes. I think what's coming through from this is not only the amount of work and the time that it takes, but it's actually based on your values as a team and for the project. So can you tell us a little bit more about the values that you share within this work?

Amelia DeFalco:

So we've identified three key values that guide the project, but these have emerged through the work. And this was something that was a bit difficult. Starting out feeling like it was this task that we had waiting for us and yet we couldn't quite get to. We didn't feel ready to really choose the values that were guiding us. And so it is only really at the midpoint of the project which is really where we are now, that we've come to understand the project values. And so we've recently identified those, I think I did mention them earlier as being care, creativity and accountability. And I think we had some insecurity early on about the fact that we hadn't chosen them. But now we've discussed the fact that in fact we had to do the work and discover them by doing.

Amelia DeFalco:

And that's been a lot of what this project is about, is a kind of discovery via doing well, via doing and reflecting on that. And so the practices themselves working with partners, engaging in activities and workshops and then perhaps most importantly, reflecting on what's happened and that's been built into every activity we do is that process of reflection and sometimes critique and thinking about what happened in White what was particularly generative or constructive but also what might have been done better. And so this process really of working has shown us that the way that these values have emerged from and for the work we do and care has been one that was relatively straightforward, actually, in selecting because it's something we've talked about a lot throughout and also kind of what we mean by care. In fact, in the earliest days when we had our project launch, one of the I guess you might say the exhibits of that launch was something called objects of care, where we kind of brought together a selection of seemingly unrelated objects and kind of investigated how and why they might connect to care and through a variety of perspectives. And the thing about care is that we recognize that as we've said in our write up, it's quite a capacious term which is really productive for us and presents all kinds of wonderful possibilities, but it also is a very frequently misused or word that can actually be used to conceal harmful behavior. So it does require a degree of vigilance and reflection and thinking about how we're using it and whether we are actually living up to the idea of care that we have, which you can read all about on our website because we go into a fairly lengthy discussion of what we mean by care and whose model of care we understand as being the most relevant to what we do. And for us it has to do with the kind of ideas of mutual thriving and it's really connected to a high degree of responsibility and obligation and critique the creativity value. Like care, we understand creativity to be incredibly wide ranging and for us, criticality is part of creativity.

Amelia DeFalco:

And that's been something that's been, as I mentioned, key to everything we do because it's that process of reflection and critique and making sure that we always are asking why we're doing things and how we're doing them and why we've chosen the techniques we have. So again, this is all kind of pointing to the fact that doing this kind of care based and what we often find to be careful research requires a tremendous resources, especially a lot of time, because it means making time to have sometimes difficult conversations, to really make time for reflection, to make time to examine the processes not just simply plunge into things, which is as many as we all know tends to be often the working method. That many of us employ by necessity because we just have so little time. Because our time is directed towards our many, many other professional responsibilities. And so part of what we want to do here is slow things down and make sure that we're saving making space for that kind of investigation. However, of course, that proves to be an ongoing challenge. And then accountability, the value of accountability is really about this kind of beholdenness. And again, that has been inspired partly by the Clear Lab book.

Amelia DeFalco:

And it speaks to our kind of ongoing commitment to everyone that is potentially that we see to be potentially touched by our research and to be aware of that and to constantly ask why we're doing the research. We're doing who is potentially affected by that research and to be aware of the commitments that we have and the obligations that come with those commitments. So asking who's touched by our work, how it might touch them, is there a potential for harm. That's one of the things we always are very conscious to identify and how we might mitigate that. Or perhaps we need to rethink the practice or rethink the activity itself.

Emma Spary:

Thank you. So obviously, this is the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, and I feel I have to ask, how do you think this project is going to improve Research Culture?

Clare Barker:

What we're hoping for the project is that the resources that we produce that the resources that we produce will provide other researchers with ideas and strategies for thinking about some of the things that we've been thinking about in research as well. Like I say, we've learned a lot from the resources produced by other labs and other research groups. And we see our equality and inclusion documents, which at the moment includes the ways of working agreement and the glossary as one of the major outputs of the project. And so we want to make sure that we can share them on our website, but also in presentations and in the conversations that we're having with other research groups, with welcome, with the universities, Research Culture team, et cetera. So hopefully those resources will prove to be useful for other researchers. I think our approach in the way that we're kind of thinking about how to centralize ideas of health, well being, healthy working practices, safe spaces, engagement with our partners in ways that are fully collaborative and kind of cognizant of the particular needs of those organizations, both as organizations but also as people. People with bodies and people with minds and things, hopefully that will be useful in thinking about how research might be actually centered around that kind of work, rather than trying to work towards good practice despite all the pressures of research culture and demand for outputs and all those kind of things. So I think there might be some outcomes of the project that are around strategies for thinking about research differently, how that fits into the institutional frameworks and the funding frameworks and everything is a really interesting question.

Clare Barker:

But how you can make research projects that perform all the things that they're required to perform while still kind of maintaining a focus on health and well being, care and accountability, et cetera. I think that's one of the things that we're hoping to do. So, yeah, I think it's a work in progress. We're at the stage where we're beginning to share what we're doing now, and we want to be in continued dialogue, basically, with the university, with other research groups about about research culture issues. And, yeah, just thinking reflectively about how we do research while doing research and using that as a model for how future research might develop.

Emma Spary:

I think we'll all be watching. We have Claire and Amelia with us, but we are also very aware that this is a small part of the team and this involves many other members and also the extensive work that you do with your partners how does that benefit the project and how has that actually translated into your ideas?

Clare Barker:

Yeah, I think what's been really interesting in working with our partners is exploring different ways of working. And sometimes the really best thing learning has come from the points of tension between them, or the points where we've had to think really hard about how we can still employ the ways of working that we want to do in ways that kind of work for everybody. So, for example, our first residency was with Interplay Theatre, which is a sensory theatre company that does a lot of work with special schools in Leeds and produces theatre performances for young people with learning disabilities and physical disabilities. And working with Interplay was really interesting in learning about the creative process that they go through. So we were thinking about things like creating safe spaces and things like that. Whereas in the practice of theatre making, sometimes it's really valuable to make people feel a bit uncomfortable or to put actors in a surprising position and to see what they come up with. And that's where the creativity comes from. So there were certain things like that where we were thinking about, oh, how do we negotiate this? In our work with Immersive networks, our creative partners, we were thinking about the kind of time processes of research and trying to think, how do we work in healthy and humane ways that are not producing overwork or stress and things like that.

Clare Barker:

But also when you're working creatively, there's often periods of really intense immersion in work and that's what before a deadline or whatever, and that's what generates the really kind of creative thinking and people coming together and the real excitement of the project. So how do you balance those things and how do you make them work? The kind of things that we've been thinking about often involve a lot of slowing down thinking, planning, thinking ahead, whereas often creative practice involves a lot more spontaneity than that. So how do you kind of reconcile those things? And that's what we've been talking about and trying to think about. And I think one of the things that was interesting was when we were with Interplay, we were thinking about what is our output going to be? And we've produced a kind of theatre performance that Interplay can take into schools. But we were also thinking at one point about should we do some kind of academic showcase version of this? Should we do some kind of thing at the university as well to show the work that we've been doing? And we decided, no, let's just focus on the one thing so we're not spreading ourselves too thin, or we're trying to conserve our energy and focus on the one thing that we want to do, rather than trying to do too much so that we can still work in those ways that support creativity and immersion and things. So, yeah, sometimes deciding. Not to do too much or not to do extra things is a way of kind of doing the things in the ways that work well for everybody.

Emma Spary:

Thank you very much. And unfortunately, we are now out of time. We have heard so much fantastic work that's going on. But also, as you said, the values that are coming through this, the approaches that you're taking, we will make sure that every link that you've said is available to people. And obviously, there's a lot more information that they can get directly from you and your websites. So thank you very much for joining us today, and I will just give you the last mic to say goodbye.

Clare Barker:

Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye.

Amelia DeFalco:

Thanks, Emma. Goodbye.