In March 2022, RDS launched the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) toolkit which is designed to support researchers to consider and embed ‘EDI’ at each stage of research. The toolkit comes in light of NIHR’s heightened emphasis on tackling health and care inequalities and making research more inclusive of underserved communities.
The role of EDI within public involvement forms a key component of the toolkit. This is indicative of how public involvement is positioned as a method to overcome mistrust of health professionals and researchers. Moreover, it is indicative of how public involvement opportunities tend be taken up by the ‘usual suspects’ who are typically white and of higher socio-economic status.
Recognising ‘barriers’ and possibilities of empowerment
To understand the dominance of the usual suspects, it’s important to not only recognise ‘barriers’ to involvement but also how the margins offer possibilities of empowerment for marginalised groups. This is a point illustrated by Valerie Walkerdine’s study on working-class communities and self-determination.
Walkerdine demonstrates how residents of a housing estate attempted to create spaces that negate the exclusionary and stigmatising forces of dominant society, and which enable them to express shared meanings and affirm their collective existence.
A key point to draw out is how acts of sociality that exist outside the remit of government-sanctioned activities play a central role in creating such spaces of collective empowerment. Viewed in this light, marginalised groups’ disengagement with research is less about a lack of knowledge or lack of interest than it is an attempt to assert agency and resist the forces that subordinate them.
Important questions for researchers
So, can researchers enter these marginal spaces of empowerment? Would entering them nullify the possibilities of empowerment that they open up? Would seeking to make the voices of the marginalised heard lead to their further stigmatisation?
Walkerdine’s study demonstrates the crucial need to critically reflect on such questions. Such critical reflection, however, shouldn’t render researchers incapable of undertaking collaborative or ‘co-produced’ research that seeks to support the self-determination of marginalised groups. As she notes (p. 711), such research is vital because it forces wider society to listen to voices that have been silenced and, therefore, opens up possibilities for social change.
Opening up collaborative or ‘co-produced’ research opportunities
Walkerdine goes onto draw attention to a number of factors that help to open up these possibilities:
- Marginalised groups leading research and ‘calling the shots’
- Researchers and professionals not imposing meanings upon the groups that they work with and assuming they are correct
- Understanding the expressions of marginalised groups in relation to the historical and social relations that provide the conditions of their existence.
Addressing these various factors is no simple task, but it is a vital one if we are to challenge inequality.
