Collaborating with care: Creating inclusive public engagement programmes with survivors

On 06 March 2024 The SHaME Project and Birkbeck's Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health (CIRMH) hosted an online seminar about public engagement with lived experience research as part of CIRMH's Researching Lived Experience in Mental Health Seminar Series. SHaME's Public Engagement Lead Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh was in conversation with Zara Asif from the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King's College London in a discussion chaired by CIRMH Director Dr Sarah Marks.
Including people with lived experience in research and engagement projects is becoming an increasingly common practice and one which is highly encouraged by funders. Working with people with lived experience and including their voices, perspectives and expertise enriches research and makes it more responsive to the communities it impacts. But it’s not without challenges, both ethical and logistical. This is especially the case with sensitive research topics like sexual violence, where it’s critical to avoid causing further harm while also representing the complexity and nuance of the research and the breadth of people’s lived experience.
A global audience joined us as CIRMH’s Director, Dr Sarah Marks, chaired a conversation between Zara Asif from the Not My Shame project and the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London and Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh from The SHaME Project at Birkbeck, University of London, exploring how to create truly inclusive programmes, different approaches to safeguarding and ethics, and how to navigate complicated university systems.
We created a safeguarding statement for this event, which you may want to consult: shame.bbk.ac.uk/wp-content/up...
Find out more about The SHaME Project at shame.bbk.ac.uk/.