Co-design, care and solidarity in social impact research projects. Jess Oddy interviewed.
Description
In this week’s episode, we talk to Jessica Oddy, founder and director of Design for Social Impact Lab (DFSI) about applying an equity-centred intersectional lens to social impact projects. We talk about the importance of co-design centred around care and solidarity throughout the entire project cycle.
Jess talks about having a systems thinking approach which engages with a community’s history and context in order to develop a project. A systems thinking approach facilitates mutual learning, where all actors stand to gain knowledge and insight from a project.
We talk about re-centering research around the people who have lived experience of structural inequity, and ensuring they are centred as experts.
Jess is the founder and director of Design for Social Impact Lab (DFSI), a social enterprise that supports organisations and practitioners design equity-centred programmes, policies, research and learning through training and coaching. Jess started her career as a teacher, before spending 13 years as an education in emergencies practitioner. She recently completed her PhD, focusing on colonial legacies in youth education. She is a guest lecturer at the University of East London's MA Social Research for Social Action, where she teaches critical participatory research approaches and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bristol, focusing on anti-racism in education.
If you’re interested to find out more about Jess’ work, take a look here:
- Website
- Academic research
- Research Design for Social Impact course launches 24th of May. Click here to sign up. We offer purchase parity payment/location based pricing, so please use the location-based code if needed.
- Design for Social Impact mission and values
- Free Guide to embedding Anti-Oppressive principles in your research design for social impact
Relevant resources:
- Marchais, G., Bazuzi, P., & Amani Lameke, A. (2020). ‘The data is gold, and we are the gold-diggers’: whiteness, race and contemporary academic research in eastern DRC. Critical African Studies, 12(3), 372–394.
- Anti-Racist Scholar Activism by Remi Joseph Salisbury and Laura Connelly
United States
