Engaging Others

The Edinburgh International Book Festival reflects on the process of creating and delivering Conversations with Ourselves in partnership with Hearing the Voice in 2014, and offers insight into how an interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration can work.

Whatever the focus of your interdisciplinary research project, it is likely that you will be engaging with groups of people whose interests and needs differ, sometimes quite radically, from that of the traditional academic researcher. Here we present our project’s early experiences of working with a diverse group of people who hear voices others don’t.

Written in 2015, this Project Short reflects on the communication strategy developed by Hearing the Voice and provides practical recommendations on how to use social media and other online communication tools in order to maximise the reach of your research.

How should a researcher respond when asked about their own beliefs? And how can an interdisciplinary project tackle the tensions that arise when faced with the differing extents to which different disciplines expect to make a claim about a shared, independent reality?

Image: The Fox sisters played a key role in the creation of Spiritualism. From left to right: Margaretta, Kate and Leah

This Project Short considers the complexities of working with a lived experience advisory group as part of a humanities PhD project. Reflecting on some of the challenges involved in working in this way in a PhD which explored fictional representations of self-harm, it describes decision-making processes and how the group shaped the research project.