TY - JOUR
T1 - Reordering the machinery of participation with young people
AU - Cowan, Hannah
AU - Kühlbrandt, Charlotte
AU - Riazuddin, Hana
N1 - Funding Information:
The research is funded by King's College London's King's Together Scheme which is in turn funded by the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) (grant reference: 204823/Z/16/Z). For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. This research has also been funded by the Guy's and St Thomas' Biomedical NIHR Biomedical Research Centre and the NIHR London Research Design Service
Funding Information:
The research is funded by King's College London's King's Together Scheme which is in turn funded by the Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF) (grant reference: 204823/Z/16/Z). For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. This research has also been funded by the Guy's and St Thomas' Biomedical NIHR Biomedical Research Centre and the NIHR London Research Design Service We would like to thank everyone who has taken part or been involved in the Utopia Now! project to date. In particular, we would like to thank Mathijs Swarte, who orchestrated and facilitated the theatre workshops, Gabrielle Quaye who helped facilitate, Theatre Peckham, who hosted and worked with us to develop the workshops, and of course all the young artists who took part in the workshop. You can see their play scripts in full at: www.utopianow.co.uk/plays. Finally, we would like to thank our funders and supporters: The King's Together Fund, The Guy's and St Thomas’ NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, and the London Research Design Service.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for SHIL (SHIL).
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - In this article, we reflect on our ongoing work that attempts to redistribute the agenda-setting powers of researchers, research funders and the complex of private and public partnerships in the biomedical sciences. Despite calls for diversification, the current landscape is dominated by a traditional medical habitus that prioritises discovery science. This has moral and political consequences. Simultaneously, we have seen a slow rise in top–down infrastructures of public participation in medical science. While we are critical of the resulting machinery of participation, we believe in its premise that knowledge and expertise are everywhere. In our research project—called Utopia Now!—we have been seeking to involve young people in deciding the future of biomedical research. However, this project is itself premised on a number of our own complicities with the power held by universities and research infrastructures. Here, we explore three preliminary tactics through which we attempt to make these complicities politically productive, taking into account the limitations of working as early career researchers. We find that our mediation between young people and researchers across disciplines is not only integral for re-politicising medical research, but also changes our understanding of knowledge production as a process of reordering, sorting and sharing.
AB - In this article, we reflect on our ongoing work that attempts to redistribute the agenda-setting powers of researchers, research funders and the complex of private and public partnerships in the biomedical sciences. Despite calls for diversification, the current landscape is dominated by a traditional medical habitus that prioritises discovery science. This has moral and political consequences. Simultaneously, we have seen a slow rise in top–down infrastructures of public participation in medical science. While we are critical of the resulting machinery of participation, we believe in its premise that knowledge and expertise are everywhere. In our research project—called Utopia Now!—we have been seeking to involve young people in deciding the future of biomedical research. However, this project is itself premised on a number of our own complicities with the power held by universities and research infrastructures. Here, we explore three preliminary tactics through which we attempt to make these complicities politically productive, taking into account the limitations of working as early career researchers. We find that our mediation between young people and researchers across disciplines is not only integral for re-politicising medical research, but also changes our understanding of knowledge production as a process of reordering, sorting and sharing.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85123500460&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/1467-9566.13426
DO - 10.1111/1467-9566.13426
M3 - Article
SN - 0141-9889
VL - 44
SP - 90
EP - 105
JO - Sociology of Health and Illness
JF - Sociology of Health and Illness
IS - S1
ER -
