The Botswana BVV project engaged men at the cattleposts to reflect on masculinities and gendered violence. The Uganda gender violence project has a similar theme, making a contrast between two settlement strategies for refugees (camps and integrated settlement), but focusses more on women’s voices. 

 

The Botswana equitable access project engages young marginalised women to get a better understanding of obstacles to accessing promotive social security programs, contrasting this with the understanding of service providers.

 

Our several Weight of Evidence projects combine conventional literature reviews with community and service provider voices, effectively grounding or contextualising the literature through participatory research. Examples include access of marginalised women to perinatal care, and child care investigations in unaccompanied young women. 

 

Our work on introducing cultural safety in medical education relies on participatory learning through game jams. The cluster randomised controlled trial tested the impact of a co-designed cultural safety curriculum implemented through game jams compared with more conventional meanse (lecture plus interactive workshop). Another educational initiative works with Inuit communities in Nunavik to co-design a curriculum for training of community health workers in TB surveillance and management.

 

We have advanced participatory methods under social distancing conditions, particularly in “no-internet” settings, and we developed software to promote advanced use of participatory approaches like fuzzy cognitive mapping. Examples include self-screening for HPV by Inuit women, causes and prevention of gender violence, and access to essential health services. Other methodological advances facilitate wider participation include the introduction of discourse analysis to replace numeracy-dependent weighting of fuzzy cognitive mapping. Our development of deliberative dialogue has advanced the concept and practice of intercultural dialogue.

 

Looking forward to 2021, we’re developing a multi-country initiative to engage institutionalised elderly in participatory social audits. Our idea is that the three functions that make up participatory research (shared governance, active use of local evidence and innovation) resonate with and could possibly reinvigorate the neuroscience concept of executive function. We’d measure impact in improved and more engaged living conditions, and quite possibly reduced cognitive decline (towards Alzheimers etc).