Academic writing workshop 23 June – 19 July 2021

HERA PhD student, Giselle Das, won over £3000 from the NIHR Global Health Research Workshop Fund Pilot to develop an academic writing workshop, ‘Writing for Global Health: developing academics of the future’.

University of Bristol’s Centre for Academic Language and Development (CALD) delivered the workshop to early career researchers (ECRs) who were new to academic English writing (but familiar with, or fluent in, English speaking and writing in other contexts). The workshop sessions were over an intensive four weeks, with subsequent one-to-one follow up tutorials.

Sixteen ECRs from six different countries attended from the HERA group, and two other NIHR Global Health Research Groups: the Violence, Mental Health, and Abuse group from UCL and the Nepal Injury Research Centre from UWE.

CALD tutors reviewed pieces of writing participants submitted each week of the workshop, which frequently “demonstrated that feedback had not only been understood but internalised to the point of affecting work produced”.

Participants were positive about the workshop’s impact and agreed that it helped them to develop their understanding of academic writing, improve their academic writing, understand readers’ expectations, and improve writing for publications.

The workshop also gave participants the knowledge and confidence to plan their next steps and build on what they had learnt: almost all participants said their next step was to continue developing their academic English. Moreover, others said they would start and/or continue working on a publication.

CALD is keen to use the structure and materials from this workshop, which was developed especially for HERA, again in future. The workshop has therefore fostered a new cross-University collaboration and has left a legacy for future ECRs.

To end the workshop, HERA’s training lead organised a series of ‘Meet the Editors’ interviews. posing questions put forward by ECRs. The editors were Dr Ṣẹ̀yẹ Abímbọ́lá (editor-in-chief, BMJ Global Health), Prof Caroline Bradbury-Jones (editor, Journal of Clinical Nursing and the International Journal of Social Research Methodology), and Prof Rebecca Macy (editor-in-chief, Journal of Family Violence). These videos are relevant to all ECRs, particularly for, but not limited to, those working in global health/violence against women researchers.

The incredibly insightful Dr Abímbọ́lá also emphasises how approaches to publishing in global health need to change in order to be decolonial and avoid epistemic injustice. We urge all those interested in adopting such approaches to take a look.

You can watch the Meet the Editors interviews here . 

Training on interviewing perpetrators 29 November 2021

Nepal HERA Co-PI, Dr Poonam Rishal, has won funding from the Nepal Health Research Council for a study titled, "Mental health and attitude towards violence and abuse among prison inmates of Baghmati province: An exploratory mixed methods study" which is co-led with Dr Kunta Devi Pun and Dr Ajay Risal (October 2021- April 2022). The team is using the socio-ecological model to explore with prison inmates the reasons they were abusive.

HERA’s training lead and colleagues from the ADVANCE (Juliet Henderson, KCL, and Amy Johnson, University of Worcester) and REPROVIDE (Dr Nate Eisenstadt and Dr Karen Morgan) perpetrator programmes delivered training on conducting effective and safe qualitative research with this high-risk and complex client group. ADVANCE and REPROVIDE researchers shared their own experiences, followed by an open forum for discussion. The slides are available here Interviewing perpetrators (PDF, 748kB) and recording of the training is available here https://youtu.be/zqpLLhaaKEA

Upcoming methods short course in Sri Lanka 7, 8 and 21 and 22 January 2022

HERA PhD student, Giselle Das is co-ordinating a training course in qualitative methods, delivered by three core HERA team members in Sri Lanka and a UK member of the capacity strengthening team (Dr Alice Malpass). The course is aimed at local Sri Lankan postgraduate students and clinicians wanting to learn qualitative research methods for the first time, from turning a research idea into a research question, all the way through to publishing a qualitative research paper. The schedule has been co-designed by the Sri Lankan and UK HERA teams to strengthen capacity in local research networks, and covers the following areas:

• Basic principles of qualitative research
• Developing a research question and a topic guide
• Developing data collection skills
• Trustworthiness, consent, and ethics in qualitative research
• Conducting an interview and transcribing it
• Analysis
• From data to publication
• Presenting qualitative data (journal checklists and presentations).

Twenty-five spaces will be available and delegates attending will be encouraged to work in small groups on the same research topic to support the sharing of data collection and analysis. The Sri Lankan team delivering components of the short course bring a range of expertise and experience in teaching qualitative methods. Delivery of the short course will strengthen capacity in the team hosting the event, as well as those attending.

ECR workshop 31 January – 3 February 2022

HERA’s ECRs from Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Nepal delivered a 4-day ECR workshop in collaboration with ECRs in Sri Lanka, India, and the UK from LSHTM and UCL’s NIHR Global Health Research group, VAMHSA.

Each day took an overarching theme, which ECRs chose:

1. Learning and skills development
2. Career development
3. Networking and building collaborations
4. Reflexivity and power

On each day, ECRs from one or two country groups took to lead in developing and delivering an online session went out live to all five country groups – as well as ECRs from other organisations and institutions across the world. ECRs also organised local sessions on the themes.

Despite challenges such as power outages and changing COVID risk levels, the event was an enormous success with over 100 attendees joining online and engaging in the Zoom chat and Padlets. HERA and VAMHSA ECR said:

“it was a wonderful event and we have very good feedback from our participants”

“I loved the premise of this workshop, we just choose a topic that we were interested in and then invite very fancy people to talk about it. It was a 10/10 ECR experience.”

“I think we can all be proud of what we have accomplished!”

Organising the workshop gave ECRs a flavour of event management: the researchers took the lead with developing a plan and budget, inviting speakers, booking venues, inviting attendees from local universities and organisations, and chairing the sessions. It also allowed ECRs to set the agenda and focus on the issues that they find most pressing in doing global health and gender-based violence research today.

Below you can find some of the slides, talks, and audios of some of the sessions delivered.

D‌ay 1 - 31 January

• Translating research findings into policy (Office document, 6,877kB)
• Andrew Derrington – Grant writing

Day 3 – 2 February

• Dr Romina Istratii – Bridging research and practice to respond to domestic violence actively: Decolonising career pathways in the VAWG sector

Day 4 - 3 February

• Prof. R. Parker – Power relations in global health research (PDF, 1,519kB)

Bristol International Research Collaboration Activities (BIRCA) award for HERA writing workshop September 2022

The HERA team was delighted to win a £3000 BIRCA award to enable us work with early career researchers on journal articles in a writing workshop in September. Two researchers, Drs Nagham Joudeh (An-Najah University, Palestine) and Muzrif Munas (University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka) were able to visit University of Bristol, stay its bespoke building for academic visitors, Principal’s House, and enjoy protected writing time. The workshop has helped to strengthen our existing multilateral partnerships, specifically by supporting ECRs’ engagement in lead- and co-authoring of papers, amplifying our current collaboration’s impact. Importantly, the workshop has helped us to foster research capacity strengthening and help us tackle structural (including Anglo-centric colonial) barriers that prevent low-middle income country researchers publishing in international English-language journals. The workshops will develop and advance the gender-based violence field through high-impact publications, which in turn will influence research, policy, and practice. Joint outputs will increase our group’s competitiveness for future grants and (post)doctoral fellowships, thus helping us to retain HERA’s talented ECRs in academia.

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