Outreach and Advocacy

Facilitators

Laura Pigozzi, Northwestern University (Thursday September 10th, 1-2pmET)

Jennifer Malkowski, Cal State Chico (Thursday September 10th, 5-6pmET)

Hub Description

Interested in dynamic health and medical realities, sensitive to the affordances of kairos, and committed to doing highly impactful work, scholars in RHM have been dedicated to making deliberate contributions to advocacy campaigns and to performing tangible outreach work. As more and more RHM scholars enter into public writing spaces, as more scholars in the field describe themselves as “advocates” as well as academics, the field is well-positioned have generative conversations on how outreach and advocacy work ought to be approached. The spirit of this hub is to encourage such conversations. If you are passionate about outreach and advocacy and have done it all along, join this conversation! If you’ve never done anything of the sort and would like to or are even just intrigued, join this conversation!

Generative questions

  • How can collaborative scholarship (research done with and for community partners, for example) lead to acts of strategic advocacy?
  • As RHM scholars attempt to do more with their skillsets in public spheres related to health and medicine, what are some possibilities, and what are potential limitations?
  • What resources do we have to describe and promote the work we can be doing to outside stakeholders we want to be working with and for?
  • What are RHM’s ethical obligations/orientations to the communities in which we work or with whom we are advocating?
  • how do we work through the idea  of “speaking for others” and what considerations (if any) need to be made if one is not racially, ethnically, or experientially concordant with the research participants?

Discussion Hub Synthesis

The synthesis below was created from notes taken during the two hubs, from the Zoom chats, and (when available) the live captioning. Thank you to Justiss Burry for the work on creating this synthesis.

Main Takeaways

  • Collaboration is key for you and your community partners; there should be reciprocal engagement.
  • Teaching is a space for advocacy.
  • Trust from the community should always be forefront in your research.
  • Think of ways to reach a wider audience so that the collaborative work can benefit the community as much as possible.
  • Avoid tailoring research for the grant or grants you are aiming for, rather than best practices.
  • Ethical considerations of the research should be set in advance going in and negotiated with the community as autonomous.
  • Researchers should add an ethics statement to the beginning of their research – even that outside of IRB requirements.
  • Use writing as a process of discovery for everyone included.

Issues of Labor

  • How do we figure out how to compensate those participating?
    • Money is ok if you can, but what about other non monetary compensation such as food or products that the community may need
    • Another helpful idea around compensation is offering to help communities complete what they want to get done as a result of working alongside the researcher.
  • It’s hard to do usability and usability testing in an online setting, so we need to start thinking about what we can accomplish.
  • There is a labor of love of connecting with people and working with them, so this may be one way to address labor.

Collaboration in Communities

  • You have to know the population that you’re pulling participants from and why and how this may impact them and your work, especially vulnerable populations or populations that require different power dynamic approaches (marginalized folks v. doctors included in your research) as they are not all protected equally.
  • The more you know the community and the community knows you, the more trust is built.
  • Defining from the outside what the community needs is imperative to conducting ethical research.
  • Researchers are not “fixing” something in communities. It’s more valuable to analyze a group as autonomous.
  • Be sure to ask for feedback from not only how the group is represented but also how they feel they’re being represented.

Recruitment

  • IRB is a required approval, so getting people to be involved in different types of community based participatory research is essential to recruitment too.
  • Community based participatory research typically requires a lot of funding, and you also want to leave something behind (such as job/resource for the community). You need to consider what’s ideal and ethical.

Future Considerations

  • How things are portrayed both in writing and things that are produced through data?
  • Is it ethical for us to use this labor in ways that might benefit us, especially during the COVID pandemic?
  • What do they (participants) get in exchange? How do you honor the labor they do as well?
  • What considerations need to be taken (if any) if you are not racially, ethnically, or experientially concordant (or accurately presenting) your participants?
  • Generally speaking, how do we incorporate the most ethical methods and positionality?