Participatory Research Fund: 2023-2024 projects

Professional Services

Adopting creative writing in participatory research with librarians and students

Project contact: Vicky Grant, University Library

The purpose of this project is to develop and share an innovative approach to participatory research by using creative writing techniques with librarians and underrepresented student groups.

This will be through developing and running workshops exploring beliefs about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education. Using participatory methods has the potential to be empowering, but is also challenging in terms of overcoming power differentials, sustaining engagement, managing discussion of sensitive issues, and overcoming cross disciplinary expectations about research.

We need to better understand how to design creative writing activities appropriately. The project will explore these research design issues to produce training materials in the format of a toolkit to enable researchers in the Participatory Research Network to adopt creative writing methods successfully. 

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Arts and Humanities

Participatory research for rural land rights in South Africa: Grassroots journaling of an unfolding land rights crisis

Project contact: Seth Mehl, School of English, Digital Humanities Institute

This project addresses the human dimensions and socio-cultural consequences of a regional experience of forced displacement, Apartheid policies, service delivery delays, and economic inequality - within the context of an unfolding contest over prime property land in the underserved rural community of Dixie, in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa.

Dixie includes land adjacent to the extremely profitable public-private enterprises of the Kruger National Park; for this reason, Dixie land has been the object of disputes between community members, local authorities, and private developers for decades.

In late 2019, community members, local authorities, and private developers again came into renewed conflict over rights and access. Since that time, our team has been working with Dixie residents and our partner Pala Forerunners (a grassroots rural development NGO), using humanities-based participatory methods to support the co-creation of a grassroots archive of unfolding events. 

Throughout 2024, Pala Forerunners will assist the Dixie community to properly assess, adjudicate and renegotiate a development proposal from a major developer, for the Dixie land. The whole process will be thoroughly documented with the support of this project. 

Roots and Futures

Project contact: Lizzy Craig-Atkins, Department of Archaeology

Roots and Futures is a longstanding place-based heritage project in the Department of Archaeology. Since 2020 we have been undertaking participatory action research examining the heritage needs of communities currently underserved by heritage policy in Sheffield.

We have an established track record of developing and maintaining mutually supportive partnerships with community organisations and delivering consultations that generate meaningful insights into the needs and priorities of Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.

Our findings have, so far, contributed to the adoption of the Sheffield Heritage Strategy by Sheffield City Council by demonstrating that it is feasible to deliver more inclusive heritage work in Sheffield; been integrated into the Sheffield City Goals project and fed into new funder policy via participation in the AHRC place-based programme and the British Academy ‘Universities as Social and Cultural Infrastructure’ discussion board.

We seek funding to continue three strands of project work:

• Strand 1 -  Further consultations with communities. As Roots and Futures has gained traction in Sheffield, we are receiving more and more requests from groups wishing to participate. Without sustained funding for the team we cannot respond in an effective or timely manner. 
• Strand 2 - Developing our consultation practice toolkit. 
• Strand 3 - Growing a new project focus on young people as this group are currently excluded from heritage policymaking in the city and have much to gain from being supported to participate in our work. 

This is our voice and these are our songs: Music and me in young-onset dementia

Project contact: Jennifer MacRitchie, Department of Music

This proposed project provides the opportunity for people living with young-onset dementia to help shape how research on designing musical interventions for dementia is conducted, and to communicate with others how their needs might be different to an older cohort.

We will develop materials (a publicly shared film) from this innovative work to raise awareness of these different needs.

An additional innovation of this proposed project is in our methods of working in participatory research. A large number of participatory research activities and discussions about music are prominently verbal. For people living with dementia, particularly those who have young-onset dementia, language skills can be impaired.

With the stigma around older adults using new technologies, the majority of academic literature is often focused around perceptions and attitudes to technology rather than its use.

We are partnering with Dr Joseph Lindley at University of Lancaster in design research to explore the use of AI techniques (both text and image generation) so that only a limited amount of verbal prompting is required to still create new musical designs and ideas.

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Engineering

Patient motion monitoring during radiotherapy treatment

Project contact: Sanja Dogramadzi, Automatic Control and Systems Engineering

With our overarching aim to design, build and test a Gamma-Knife compatible motion capture surface (MCS) for head and neck tracking, we would like to carry out a small-scale preliminary study with the Gamma Knife clinical team to define design requirements, limitations and benefits of its use and integration requirements with the existing Gamma Knife machine.

We will use different participatory design methods to engage the clinical team and elicit the above stated outcomes.

The projected results will be fed into the next phase of the device development to facilitate faster integration and clinical impact. 

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Health

Developing a toolkit for engaging community research link worker (CRLW) to increase research participation power for underserved communities

Project contact: Habiba Aminu, Division of Population Health

Community researcher link worker (CRLW) roles are crucial to ensuring culturally appropriate research and providing a balanced voice to research projects. 

This project aims to extend the impact of various projects across the university, which have resulted in the development of CRLW roles in a range of underserved communities, upskilling them to recruit participants, conduct interviews and or facilitate focus groups in their communities.

The project will celebrate and share diverse ways that faculties or research networks within TUoS are engaging the CRLW, identifying best practices and practical steps.

These will then be developed into a comprehensive, interactive, easy-to-understand toolkit to provide guidance for new researchers.

While there are many toolkits for engaging communities that may provide some useful tips, these have some limitations as they were not specifically developed around engaging CRLWs from underserved communities.

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Science

Evaluating the biodiversity benefits of native vs. non-native trees in the urban forest

Project contact: Stuart Campbell, School of Biosciences

More than 80% of the UK population live in cities and towns and interact with the trees interwoven across the urban landscape.

This recognition has led to a drive to increase tree cover in urban areas. However, sustainable management of the urban forest is complex for a number of key reasons and all individuals, communities, private sector, third sector organisations and public bodies who interact with the urban forest are its stakeholders.

This funding will enable the co-design of research with a key group of stakeholders in the urban forest, who are involved in key challenges in sustainable forest management.

Stakeholders include public sector bodies such as Sheffield City Council, the NHS, third sector agencies such as The Woodland Trust, Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust, the NHS Forest, and the Land Trust, the research organisation Forest Research, local communities and academic researchers from the Faculty of Science and Faculty of Social Sciences. 

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Social Sciences

Crossing the frontier: Exploring the potential of the Collective Mobile Method as a participatory research tool in Rotherham

Project contact: Aneta Piekut, Sheffield Methods Institute

This project will develop and apply a Collective Mobile Method in collaboration with Rotherham residents, community organisers, local authorities and local artists, to understand and redress the harms associated with social frontiers.

This builds on the international mixed-methods project Life At the Frontier (LATF), which asks how ‘social frontiers’ - understood as distinct boundaries between neighbouring communities - shape the experiences and life outcomes of the different social and ethnic groups living near them.

The UK case study is Rotherham West, where we have analysed census data and conducted 34 semi-structured interviews with residents, community organisers, government officials and policymakers, in order to locate and assess the effects of social frontiers in three socio-economically deprived neighbourhoods.

This work has revealed a disconnect between marginalised residents and decision-makers; health and well-being challenges related to the underprovision and underuse of public space; and limited resident mobility due to insecurity when walking between neighbourhoods.

This project aims to explore and begin to address these frontiers through participatory action research with residents by asking ‘To what extent can the Collective Mobile Method serve to better understand and redress the negative effects of social frontiers?’

Fulfilling Philosophies and Practices of Participatory Research With and For Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs)

Project contact: Lauren White, Sheffield Methods Institute

Our focus for this project is about consolidating rich insights from experiences of PGRs involved in participatory research and seeking to fulfil philosophies and practices at The University of Sheffield (TUoS) and beyond.

This project builds on ‘Exploring and Embedding PGR experiences of Participatory Research’ (2022/2023, Research England) which has successfully worked with doctoral students across different faculties in a series of workshops. Together, we explored the challenges, hopes and aspirations of participatory research and assembled calls to action for improving research cultures within the University for our postgraduate researchers.

Our research findings include: (i) collaboratively defining participatory research with and for PGRs; (ii) considerations on facilitating participatory research and collaboration with PGR-research cultures in mind; (iii) suggestions for improving and working within institutional limits; and (iv) rethinking the possibilities of participatory analyses and dissemination.

In this new project, we will consolidate and implement these actions widely across TUoS in accessible, meaningful and sustainable ways, including dissemination across all academic faculties and professional services, and scaling up suggestions from our PGRs to attend to their needs. 

Participatory Climate Futures: Innovating Citizen Participation in Climate Assemblies

Project contact: Lena Dobrowolska, School of Architecture

The project aims to rethink how citizen participation is conceived in relation to the formulation, documentation, and continuity of Climate Assemblies.

Between October- December 2023, The South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) is holding a Citizens’ Assembly involving 100 citizens on climate futures, asking participants the following questions: “The way our climate is changing will impact us all. How should we respond, to build a thriving and sustainable future for South Yorkshire?”.

Climate Assemblies are an emerging form of deliberative democracy employed to provoke conversations around the issues and impacts of climate change within communities. However, there tends to be limited engagement with participants and communities following an assembly, and it is not evident how their recommendations are acted on.

For this project, we will specifically explore the potential for innovation in pre-event collective agenda-setting, in-event (inclusive, visible, interactive) documentary, and post-event evaluation and progression – and how that, in turn, impacts shared climate future imaginaries, the types of solutions being put forward, and who participates in assemblies.

These questions will be explored through a series of workshops on Climate Assemblies and the co-creation of an interactive documentary (idoc) with a diverse range of stakeholders as citizen-researchers, including both academics (from the fields of communication, politics, architecture and art practice) and non-academics from local authorities, community climate-focused organisations as well as communities underrepresented in the climate discourse.