Open Research Week 2024: Thursday, 29 February, Connecting and engaging with communities

Open Methodologies: for research with marginalised communities / Dr Nadia Svirydzenka, Associate Professor/Reader in Culture, Identity, and Mental Health, Deputy Director Mary Seacole Research Centre, De Montfort University

Dr Nadia Svirydzenka is an Associate Professor and Reader in Culture, Identity, and Mental Health at De Montfort University and Deputy Director of Mary Seacole Research Centre. She is a social and cultural psychologist, and her research interests lie in understanding mental health of marginalised populations though culturally framed identities, attitudes, stigma, and behaviours. She is passionate about transdisciplinary research and in her projects she blends the use of creative methodology (theatre, photo elicitation, digital storytelling) with traditional mixed methods (qualitative interviews and quantitative survey methods) to elicit new stories and lived experiences, and catalyse fresh thinking about possible solutions. In her projects, she works closely with directly affected communities, funded by UKRI, including CHAMPIONS, an ESRC and Shelter Scotland funded work exploring the impact of temporary accommodation and homelessness on health and development of children in the UK. She is currently leading an AHRC funded work on Gender Based Violence and Resilience in internal migrant women and the hijra in slum communities in Pune.

RIC=KI / Prof. Amanda Daley, Professor of Behavioural Medicine, Director of the Centre for Lifestyle Medicine and Behaviour (CLiMB), Loughborough University

Amanda Daley is a Professor of Behavioural Medicine and an NIHR Research Professor in Public Health. She is the Director of the Centre for Lifestyle Medicine and Behaviour (CLiMB) and leads RIC-KI, the Research Ideas Catalogue – Knowledge & Impact. Her work is focused on investigating the effects of lifestyle interventions on health outcomes with a particular interest in testing lifestyle interventions that can be delivered by health care professionals within routine NHS consultations.

Untitled / Dr Stef de Sabbata, Associate Professor of Geographical Information Science, University of Leicester

Stef De Sabbata (they/them) is an Associate Professor of Geographical Information Science at the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment and a Fellow of the Institute for Digital Culture of the University of Leicester. They are the Chair of the Geographical Information Science Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers), part of the steering committee of GIScience Research UK (GISRUK) and the Chair of the GISRUK Conference 2018, and a member of the Commission on Location Based Services of the International Cartographic Association. They hold a PhD from the Department of Geography of the University of Zurich (2013), where their research focused on geographical knowledge discovery for location-based services. They were a Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Junior Research Fellow at the Wolfson College of the University of Oxford, where they applied geographical data science approaches to the fields of internet studies and digital geographies. Their current research focuses on geographical artificial intelligence, including the development of spatially-explicit approaches to urban analytics and the use of foundation models in digital geographies and cultural analytics.