Engaged research strategy

Version 1 September 2024

Who we are

The Wellcome Discovery Research Platform for Transformative Inclusivity in Ethics and Humanities Research (ANTITHESES) is a collaborative and cross-disciplinary partnership. The Platform brings together a network of researchers and practitioners based at the University of Oxford, the University of Singapore and in the UK museums and heritage sector.

The core partners include:

University of Oxford: The Oxford Neuroscience, Ethics and Society Group (NEUROSEC), the Uehiro Oxford Institute, the Ethox Centre, and the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology

The Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, at the University of Singapore

Museums and heritage cultural experts, Culture&

Our mission

Antitheses addresses an urgent need for research that can engage meaningfully with the radical value disagreements, polarisation, and informational uncertainty characteristic of contemporary medical science, practice, and policy.

Available approaches to ethics and humanities research lack the concepts, methods, and tools to do this work. They have insufficient diversity of voices, are overly safe and conservative, and overwhelmingly Western. We need new approaches.

To address these challenges, Antitheses brings together expertise, from the UK and internationally, across the fields of history, philosophy, the fine arts, design bioethics, sociology, and global bioethics.

Context

This plan will sit within the overall context of the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Strategic Plan, as well as reflecting the engaged research priorities of Wellcome (our primary funder). As part of Oxford Population Health (the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford) we also adhere to the principles of the Athena SWAN Charter.

Our vision for Engaged Research

We refer to the Wellcome guidelines on engaged research as both a practice and an intrinsic requirement for our work:

Engaged research means embedding stakeholder perspectives across the research lifecycle — from agenda setting, funding, and research design through to implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. An engaged research approach can involve a variety of methodologies, frameworks, and skills to appropriately engage relevant stakeholders at key points. (From Wellcome Guide to Engaged Research)

We view engagement and involvement as an integral part of our research practice and culture. We seek to actively embed the public in our work and endeavour to remove (known, or discover unknown) barriers to wider involvement. This will bring benefits to the skills and attitudes of all stakeholders and ensure our work is socially conscious, transparent and relevant.

We propose three interconnected approaches to our engaged research work:

Consultation

• We will ensure that the research conducted across our network is informed by relevant public views, concerns, perspectives and priorities.

Collaboration

• We will collaborate with a variety of different non-scientific/academic audiences to ensure the ethical involvement in our research of those directly affected or related to the underpinning research questions.

Co-creation

• We will embed non-academic stakeholders in our practice, to co-create and develop new ways of approaching our research questions, but also working on iterations that further adjust and shape our work so that it is better informed, more reliable and trustworthy.

What do we seek to achieve through our Engaged Research practice?

Through engaging publics and wider stakeholders in our research, we aim to:

1. Develop a culture across our network where public and community involvement is embedded as part of the research process.
2. Build capacity within the Centre, so that our staff and students are enabled and supported to follow an engaged research practice in their work.
3. Build capacity amongst our community groups and public partners that seek to better understand their needs to engage with us, and any perceived barriers to their ongoing involvement in our work.
4. Develop, test and review new engagement methods that encourage public consultation and collaboration in our work on contentious issues in human health. Endeavour to publish these findings where appropriate.
5. Broaden the inclusion of people local to our respective research groups and centres, in the co-creation of our engaged research methods and the development of our work.

Our engagement activities will be representative of the work across the Antitheses Platform and developed in response to opportunities and perceived needs. Methods will include public debates and discussion events, theatre and the visual arts, citizens’ juries, documentary films and podcasts. This work will be linked to a range of online and social media communications activities where practicable.

Key publics

We will pay careful attention to the identification and building of partnerships with relevant publics and key stakeholders. While we encourage our researchers to work with the public most appropriate to the purpose of their engagement activity, Antitheses key groups will include:

• Arts communities and institutions; who have the creative capacity to explore our work in new ways, encouraging different perspectives on our underpinning research questions (and what those questions should be) for both researchers and publics alike.
• Practitioners, researchers and educators based in the Museums and Heritage sector in the UK; who can inform our work on the role of museums spaces in conversations around decolonisation, display, repatriation, mental health and our shared human story.
• Children and young people; who can initiate conversations on the implications that questions raised through the Antitheses Platform may have for their mental health, their future and the future of others.
• Key representatives and groups engaged with radical value disagreements and topics that prove polarising or divisive, including but not limited to; research participants, medical researchers, ethical practitioners and charities who have the potential to better inform and shape our work.

We intend to engage public groups and individuals from a variety of backgrounds and encourage diversity across all of our activities, as broader perspectives will enrich and better inform our work. We will endeavour to produce accessible digital projects and content, that enables those unable to participate in person to do so virtually. This will ensure a broad discourse that will challenge and shape our research, whilst providing an inclusive platform for all voices and opinions to be heard.

How we will implement this strategy

• We will support our staff and students in embedding engaged research into their work through; providing bespoke and University-led training, responding to the interests and skills gaps of our staff and students, and through monitoring the ongoing work in engagement through an internal ‘Mapping Method’ devised with reference to the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement EDGE Tool targets.
• We will listen to our community partners on the issues that prevent or inadvertently exclude them from involvement in our work and seek to address these barriers. This will involve a consultation and evaluation process that spans the lifetime of the project. We will then adapt our work in response to this iterative process.
• We will work with and alongside museums and heritage partners in understanding the ethical issues relevant to both museums practitioners and their visitors. This will better inform current understanding of the decolonisation of these spaces and the role of museums as perceived by different cultural groups.
• We will forge and maintain partnerships with arts practitioners and creative communities, to co-create new ways of exploring and developing our research questions. This will involve re-developing internal (University) processes that better support partnerships with external groups and also addressing the entrenched ‘power imbalance’ in external partnerships, by placing a focus on empowering and enabling our public and community partners to guide and shape our work.
• We will develop and test new ways of including public input into our work; through either creative mechanisms co-created with arts partners, or with practitioners already working in ethical spaces where there is evidence of value disagreement. This work will be mindful of potential power imbalances present in these dynamics and seek ways to acknowledge and address these.
• We will publish our findings on Engaged Research practices, where ethical and appropriate to do so.

Governance

A Community Advisory Group and an internal Strategic Oversight Group will guide the development of our engaged research work and its alignment with our strategic aims.

This Engaged Research Strategy, and our Evaluation Framework will be reviewed annually by our Community Advisory Group, our internal Strategic Oversight Group and the NEUROSEC Young Person’s Advisory Group.

The Antitheses engagement programme will be developed in collaboration with all project partners for the network both in the UK and Singapore. Through this work we will connect with the wider University of Oxford public engagement programmes, the Humanities (including TORCH and the Cultural Programme), the Medical Sciences (in particular those led by Oxford Population Health) and the Social Sciences Divisions. We will also liaise with external colleagues in the Global Health Bioethics Network, Oxford-John’s Hopkins Global Infectious Diseases Collective (GLIDE) and the engaged research teams/practitioners at other Wellcome Discovery Research Platforms.

We will communicate regularly with Wellcome’s national and international engaged research teams.

Monitoring and Evaluation

We aim to learn from best practice and to make an active contribution to the development and testing of new models of evaluation, exploring the extent to which activities enable community partners and public groups to meaningfully engage with our work. We will develop a monitoring and evaluation framework to align with our strategic plan, ensuring that our work continues to meet our core aims. Through appropriate evaluation we will monitor:

• Responses from different publics to our engaged research work; including audience demographics where appropriate, the scope of the public partners in our engaged research and evidence of any impact.
• Evidence of culture change across the Antitheses network; through monitoring participation and evidence of leading and developing engaged research work, and its incorporation into grant funding applications and publications.
• Lessons learnt from our engaged research and ways we can continue to improve upon and accordingly adapt this work, including sharing this learning on our website, through reports and peer reviewed publications where appropriate.

This strategy is also available as a pdf document. Please contact us if you would prefer to read the strategy in this format.