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We created the Health, Environment and Indigenous Communities Research Group
out of the graduate students that I work with
and then also
the research assistants that I hired to help support me in the research that
I do as a faculty member
at the university. We meet on a regular basis
and it's a support group but it's also now become a learning
and a discussion group as well. We have some very interesting
critical discussions about topics that are common to all
of the research that we're all doing, whether it be about the ethics and working with communities,
translating and mobilizing knowledge
from the results from our projects or even
in some circumstances the methods that we're using in communities to examine
the issues that we're looking at
related to health and environment relationship. The realization
students that were engaged in the work as we are
were all starting to essentially break new ground in the terms
of the challenges we were facing and the way that we were carrying
out the work that we were doing in cooperation with
and in communities, to the point that we started to
work and format these working group or research
meetings
as not simply just updates (administrative updates from me
and student support sessions) but also critical learning
and reflections sessions for the students about important topics they
were facing in their research. We've taken advantage of that opportunity
because what we have realized is that in our discussion
we're actually generating new understanding
collectively from our different experiences and we've started to try to
capture that as well to disseminate that to other researchers groups, other undergraduate students here
on campus and beyond.
Knowledge mobillization to me and to other members of the research group
is not simply what you do with the results of the study or how you
communicate most effectively the results of the study.
It's everything related to the development of the relationship
what study is going to be about, how you communicate about that study and talk
and learn about that study
during the process of doing that study as well as
how you increase the chances or enhence the chances that people are going to be
able to use the results
whether it be through communication forms or knowledge transformation
forms of taking the results of a research study and transforming it into things
like a policy brief of a community education manual
or things like that. In the researcher group that I lead at the University
we do two things: we do study some aspects of knowledge mobilization
we have projects with some students
that are looking at evaluating the effectiveness of the communication of
research results.
Whether it be from a health survey in Nunavut, with the Inuit population
as an example or whether it be tracking the
output of the results of a study on food security
in a northern region and whether or not policy makers are using that
in making decisions now and into the future. The other thing that we do
related to
knowledge mobilization: is every single project that we have
has a component embedded within it of knowledge mobilization.
All of the projects that I lead, all of the projects that students conduct
are committed to the philosophy and the idea that knowledge mobilization is
a critical component of
the research process. It's not simply that something that you do at the end
in order to increase your own profile as a researcher
it's something that you have to think about and start doing from the beginning
because you have an ethical and social responsibility as researcher working
with human participants, working with indigenous communities
and indigenous individuals within communities to be able to make sure that
knowledge
is put uniform and is delivered
and is disseminated in a way that is most accessible to be able to address
the issue
that I was trying to understand in first place.