Community Engagement and Intercultural Sensitivity: Ethics, Design and Practice (in-person)
Community engagement is an increasingly important aspect of academic practice, offering insightful pathways to both the impactful dissemination and collaborative creation of new knowledge. How, though, can we ensure that engagement practices are sensitive to the cultural identities, practices and beliefs of those within the communities with which we work? Indeed, how can we design community engagement practices that enhance understanding, dialogue and agency across perceived differences, in ethical ways?
In this workshop, you will learn about what interculturally sensitive community engagement looks like in terms of research design, ethics and practice. With a particular focus on the use of listening as a methodology for community engagement of various styles, you’ll hear from academic experts in intercultural fieldwork with varied communities, including survivors of the Rwandan genocide and people navigating the asylum system. We will introduce concepts including safeguarding, consent, positionality, trauma-informed practice and participant agency.
In the morning half of the session, Dr Erin Jessee (oral history, Glasgow) will introduce you to interdisciplinary approaches to community stakeholder engagement and ethical requirements for interculturally sensitive design. Dr Soledad Montañez (modern languages, Glasgow) will focus on practical and ethical challenges of working translingually and internationally with communities and share strategies for navigating those complexities.
The afternoon session, led by Dr Anna Ball (Creative Practitioner, University of Aberdeen) will consist of a participant-guided workshop in which you’ll work in groups to apply your knowledge to a case-study, designing and testing different scenarios for interculturally sensitive community engagement using listening processes.
This training session is suitable for all doctoral students working across the Arts and Humanities who are interested in intercultural research, community engagement, impact or outreach. You do not need to have any previous experience of these fields to attend.
Participants are encouraged to attend the full event, either in person or online. A limited amount of funding is available to support travel to the workshop.
