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Together with co-investigators from UCL, OHSU and Manchester, I will be leading REPRESENT: A Community Engagement Roadmap to Improve Participant Representation in Cancer Research Early Detection. Funded by the International Alliance for Cancer Early Detection (ACED), I will be working together with renowned academics in Public Health, Epidemiology, Medicine, Genomics, Social Sciences and Public Involvement to explore how and whether community engagement approaches facilitate trust-building between cancer detection researchers and ‘underserved’ communities, and what opportunities can be fostered to negotiate the values of clinical research for some of the publics that biomedical stakeholders have historically wronged. My hope is that,Continue reading “REPRESENT: Building trust and trustworthiness in early cancer detection research”

Beyond biomedical spaces, my fellowship seeks to better understand why only some people can genuinely participate in narratives of ‘biomedical progress’ and how those experiences impinge upon emic notions of trust and belonging. The CRUK pump-priming grant ‘ Elusive Risks’, (2019-2021) has explored the social worlds of ‘structurally vulnerable’ communities in Cambridgeshire and how their experiences of care and risk inform their strategies to prevent disease and live well. To read more information about the rationale behind the project, click here: https://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/news/engaging-so-called-hard-reach-cancer-field-research Our stint of fieldwork and ongoing relationship with some of the groups we met has led to anContinue reading “ELUSIVE RISKS: Engaging with the so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ in their communities”

What have I done so far? Data collection for this study is taking place over several months across different places in Cambridge. For a social anthropologist like me (someone who tries to understand how people interact with each other and with the world around them), this is what is called ‘fieldwork’. Here I include a summary of what my fieldwork looks like! From November 2019 until the national lockdown took place, I learnt from pre-clinical scientists in laboratories, talking with them one-to-one, and participating in weekly meetings and academic events. I learnt about the technologies they are developing in theContinue reading “NEGOTIATING VALUES (clinical research)”