Why contracts often reproduce hierarchy rather than protect lived experienced collaborators. We look at co-researcher contracts, university assumptions of “vulnerability” around mental health and lived experience, IP clauses, liability, and when refusing a contract is the ethical choice.
Open for booking: 10-14 August 2026.
The course will give an overview and introduction to qualitative research methods, including individual interviews, focus group discussions, observation, ethical issues, thematic analysis, and rigour in qualitative research.
Universities increasingly emphasise research impact, yet the ethical dimensions of partnership work are often left underexplored. Working with communities, groups, organisations, and institutions brings not only opportunities, but also responsibilities that shape how relationships are built, maintained, and sustained. This interactive workshop offers a space to reflect on the ethical questions that arise in impact work.
Drawing on Dr Amna Zaqout’s research with children, this session uses children’s drawings as an example to demonstrate how visual expression can offer insight into children’s inner worlds, particularly in relation to self-concept and emotional experience.
In recent years, clinical prediction models (CPMs) have emerged as an avenue for risk stratification and the provision of highly individualised care, through careful consideration of differences across individuals’ characteristics, genes, environments, and lifestyles. In psychiatry, whilst many CPMs have shown promise in improving care, few have actualised their potential and been implemented for routine usage in clinical practice as in certain branches of medicine (e.g., cardiovascular disease and cancer).
With Jo Law. This presentation shares the methodological design of her PhD, which explores working-class motherhood. It will explain why she chose a multi-level discourse framework, how she conceptualised each level and how she is working across micro, meso, and macro levels in her analysis. Focusing particularly on the meso level, she will draw on staff interviews alongside ethnographic observations in a community centre to explore how working-class motherhood is talked about and lived in everyday interactions.
People with lived experience are increasingly involved in (mental health) research as advisors, co-researchers and authors. This session will explore how lived experience (LE) roles are defined and described in ethics applications and funding applications, including who is considered a participant, what LE members are expected to do, and what responsibilities people can hold within projects.
This facilitated conversation brings together Olivia Matshabane and Monique Botha to examine how power, inclusion, and knowledge operate across neurodiversity research. Drawing on Olivia’s and other African scholars’ scholarship thinking about African neuroethics, cultural humility, and community-centred models of care, and Monique’s scholarship on neurodiversity as a collective, activist-led framework, the discussion will question whose knowledge shapes research agendas and whose lives are marginalised by dominant clinical and academic models. Together, they will explore what more accountable, political and decolonial directions in neurodiversity research might look like.
