Challenges and Facilitators of Research between Academia and Local Communities

Date: 19 April 2019

Time: 14:45 –16:15 

Venue: Building 19, Room 610 Waseda Campus

Free attendance, no registration required

Speaker: 

Dr. Quilsom Fazil (Lecturer in Disability Studies and Behavioural Science in the College of Medical and Dental Sciences, University of Birmingham)

Dr. Quilsom Fazil obtained her PhD at the University of Birmingham with a thesis focused on the social and cultural origins of depression in British Pakistani Muslim women living in the U.K. She is a Lecturer in Disability Studies and Behavioural Science in the College of Medical and Dental Sciences and teaches medical degree students and postgraduate students. She has carried out research with a diverse range of migrant communities living in the U.K in a number of health-related areas. She was a co-investigator on £1.5 million project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in which she worked with the British Pakistani community exploring how creative research methods can enable communities to create their own narratives to challenge existing mainstream ones around health and well-being.

Abstract:

In the seminar Dr. Fazil will challenge the narrative of inaccessible and closed off communities deemed as "hard to reach." Her stance is that the generalist methodologies employed by researchers lead to poor participation of minority communities in research, which leads to a lack of understanding of health issues relevant to these communities. She proposes that ground-up co-produced culturally appropriate designs and solutions are required to engage with communities and individuals from diverse backgrounds. This approach is not without its challenges. She will describe a study with the British Pakistani community co-created culturally appropriate methodologies that were devised taking an ethnographic bottom up approach. Some of the challenges related to this and how these were overcome will be discussed. She will conclude with outlining some initial findings of the research that challenge existing narratives of the British Pakistani Muslim community in the U.K.