Kelly Ann McKercher Transcript

Transcript

1. 1 www.captionslive.com.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0425 904 255 UX AUSTRALIA Design Research 2020 Day 2 Friday, 20 March 2020 Captioned by: Gail Kearney & Rebekah Goulevitch
2. 2 KELLY ANN McKERCHER: Fantastic. So my name is Kelly Ann McKercher. I was born at the base of a dormant volcano in Aotearoa in New Zealand. Hello to anyone dialling in from Aotearoa. I have always been a guest on Indigenous lands, both in Aotearoa and here in Australia and I come to you today from Gadigal in the Eora Nation and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. I want to acknowledge the cost that has come with the sharing of this land and my personal hope that we might move to a place of justice and equity into the future. It would also be remiss not to acknowledge the role that research has played in colonising and re-colonising Indigenous people and I guess at times writing over black spaces with white words. I use the proceed noun of them, they and theirs. Please do so too. You can find me on Twitter or at my website. So today I'm speaking specifically about peer and community-led research and in the context of social stuff. When I say that, I mean things like domestic and family violence, mental health, suicide and the intersects. That's different to the world of some of our commercial colleagues here on the call. And I guess with that difference comes some different imperatives, sensitivities and considerations. Some of which Jax spoke about yesterday. So talking about a specific methodology, I want to talk about redistributing power back to the people we talk about. I would like you to think about who owns research, who owns stories and ultimately who bears the benefit and the brunt of those things. I will show you a few tools, I will tell a few stories and when I was thinking about this talk, I thought perhaps a more appropriate name was whoever holds the pen tells the story. And telling our own story in our own words is really important and particularly for marginalised or vulnerable communities. It gives the chance to rewrite narratives that have historically and traditionally focused on strength and deficits. Sorry, deficit and disadvantages as opposed to strength and resilience. And I think that requires a shift of frame like Paul spoke about yesterday. So accent-wise, when I say peer research, you are probably hearing the fruit whereas I'm talking about peer, the friends. I've worked in social design and research for the last decade-odd. In and out of government and non-profit, largely in house and in my own business called Beyond Sticky Notes. I'm currently working in the NSW Government where I work with the most extraordinary people, scientists, couriers, doctors, all who at this moment in time are really frantically getting through an enormous testing volume to support the health of our communities at this pandemic. I also have a book that has come out called 'Beyond Sticky Notes' and it would be remiss of me not telling you about it given all book launches have had to shift at the moment. Whether it's domestic violence, Indigenous health, mental health, over the last five or so years I've been hearing a series of things that have become increasingly worry some or don't sit quite right with me. And some of those things are people saying why do people I don't know, know such about me. Why is this report about all the things I can't do, I don't see my life like that. We are left with a report that no-one can read and no idea what to do with it. How can a non-Indigenous person write
3. 3 about Indigenous lives. And the big one which for me I feel most is the question of why am I always being researched. And I would like you to think about the implication that comes with being a person, a family, a community that is continually researched. What might that feel like and what might that say? And I guess while some of us have moved away from these things or have found ways that we don't hear these things, I guess many of us are still in a space where these things continue to happen. So we often talk about power without really talking about it or saying what it is specifically or how more people have more of it and people have less of it in our society, in our world. So as Jax mentioned, power is the ability to bring about a change in your life or the life of others. And there's all kinds of ways that we have more power. We might be part of a majority group, we might have more wellness, decision making authority, power, we might be more gregarious or extroverted or we might also be white. In our work as social de signers, many of the communities and people that we work with can't tick many of these boxes whereas often in our position we can. And that creates a power differential or a power difference in the relationship. And if we don't name and tame power, then we inadvertently end up adding to people's shame, their isolation and their sense of not being a competent interpreter of their own lives. I really like these questions that British parliamentarian Tony Benn asks which I think we can also ask of ourselves, which is what power have you got, where did you get it from, in whose interest do you exercise it, to whom are you accountable and how can we get rid of you. So how about you? How would you answer those questions? In preparing this talk, I wanted to talk about the history of our collective industry. What systems want from us and ask of us as researchers and how people and families tend to feel about the things that we do. And particularly the things that they want for themselves. And unfortunately research is a tool that can be weaponised, as we heard yesterday and sometimes can lead to the disadvantage of people, whether it's the taking away of opportunities, resources, family members and as researchers we might not realise how complicit we've been in that process. So I see both sides here as a social researcher but also a person in community, as a foster parent to a very complex resilient young man who has researched continuously through different kinds of systems and there is a certain level of dehumanisation that comes along with that. So when I put my ear to the ground in community, some of the things I hear people really are wanting is research that is respectable, reciprocal, relational and useful. The usefulness is defined by the community itself and people in community as opposed to what we might think or government might think is most needed. And that contrasts to the fly-in and fly-out world where consultants might pop in and get what they need, which is more of an inquisitive style. I hear lots of community members tell me they felt really uncomfortable when someone with a significantly different power and
4. 4 different (inaudible) came and spoke and were fearful their access to service might be taken away if they didn't perform. Researchers are stuck in a fallacy that rapport solves all and we should work around people's discomfort instead of asking ourselves what role are we playing in the perpetuating of this discomfort. I hear lots of communities asking the question of why can't I tell my story and confused about hearing the message of, oh, we just don't have the resources to hear from everyone or only 10 people can be involved in this discovery. And I hear people saying surely there's a different way of learning and listening from each other. We are stuck in this language of people being hard to access. There is no such thing as that. Systems and consultations are hard to access. They are often unnecessarily formal and really don't meet people where they are. Sometimes I hear colleagues, particularly who have come from different cultural views, having their work edited to read better. And when we edit things, we are actually editing out social and conscious nuance. As I mentioned at the very start and as Stan Grant has reminded this particular Invasion Day, sometimes we write over black spaces with white words. Sometimes we have this temptation to talk about individual behaviours. So why is this person unable to thrive. Why are they doing this particular thing or why can't they be more healthy. And when we do that, we're failing sometimes to understand systems, including systems of oppression that make it disproportionately difficult for some people to thrive at all. So by contrast some of the words that I am hearing from community about what they want and what they need is more self-determination, more decolonising practices, what Adrian Murray Brown calls transformative justice and more healing-centred work. That flies in stark contrast, I guess, to some of the styles that we work that might be unintentionally re-colonising or continuing to hold power with a certain privileged group of people. And we might be those people. I hear communities asking for my diverse responses, that they don't need more professional intervention, services or programs but perhaps would like to take up the mantle of responding to things themselves. And while we tend to use rapport, stories as standards for real people, unsurprisingly people in community don't accept that and they want more seats at the table to be a part of the processes of making them about their stories and about their lives. So where does that leave us? Hopefully a little bit uncomfortable and hopefully in that discomfort ready to hear about something that might be an alternative or might be a new frame. So what if we got out of the way and supported people to tell their own stories? And alongside doing that, what if we increased our system's capacity to listen directly to people, families and communities? So in the paradigm of peer or community-led research, we are moving from the left side of the screen, which is really about researcher as expert and as author, where a small team or in our previous example a really big team talked to as many people as the project allows. And sometimes that doesn't allow for much. And unfortunately also researchers, as hard as we try for diversity, may end up being from a
5. 5 particular identity group and that might not be the same identity as the community or people we're trying to get alongside. So in a peer and community led setting, the research offers to that coach or supporter that we build a network of people in community, train them, support them to talk to people in their own natural networks. And usually that's between three and five people, as not to create a really significant burden. So if you imagine you had 10 people of various identities, you might end up with 50-odd stories. So if we are to dim our light like the conference title suggests, that means that we are sort of shape shifting in our role or are attempting to be biodegradable in some capacity. And that means we have to soften that purist thing of I could do that better. Because in social justice it's not always about whether we could do something better but where people's goals and aspirations for their own lives have not been adequately met and where we can potentially change the way we're working to participate in things like greater self-determination to colonising methodologies and transformative justice. And I really like what Pateman and Willliment say, when people are never asked to give anything back and when the assets they represent are deliberately sidelined, they atrophy. The fact that social needs continue to rice is not due to fail is not about consulting enough u but a failure to ask people for their health and use the skills they have. I think sometimes we are so worried about asking people for their help that we actually don't ask enough of them. Often I've noticed over the last decade, people are willing to give so much more than we give them credit for. So the methodology that I'm proposing or suggesting today has five key steps and it will be a familiar pattern to many of you in terms of how you work or how you're working. But, of course, starts out with making sure we're reaching the light people and doing that in relational and sensitive ways but then involves bringing a group of people together from a particular community, focusing on building social connections first and foremost in that group. Sharing our own stories, learning to listen and co developing discovery tools. So we don't make things for people, we support them to make them for themselves and their community. Those people who I call insight gatherers, because I think it's less formal and intimidating, then go out into the world and talk to people who are already in their natural network. We want to keep some momentum in that. I found over time if we leave people in the field, per se, too long they tend to get side tracked, forget about what they heard or lose some of the materials that they were potentially capturing responses. We bring people back together for what I call an analysis jam where we are debriefing making storytelling and building advocacy strategies based on what we're hearing. And then the next step is bringing the findings to life and being able to engage all those people who built their capacity, their learning and their collective knowledge, how do we share that more broadly out into the world. So I will give you some specific examples. There's four principles that set across these things that I've found are really important. The first one unsurprisingly is relational. So this work is very much grounded in existing relationships and in unhurried slowness. It's really in some ways somewhat disrespectful to suggest someone would tell the story of their life in one hour or one-and-a-half hours.
6. 6 We are attempting to work relationally because it tends to be more affirming for people who are imagine naturalised or vulnerable, that we are minimising the shame and anxiety that can come with meeting a new person and when we're already understood in our back story, when someone understands where we are, where we've come from, what matters to us, we can start from a more advanced moment in time as opposed in attempting to scramble for the back story. It's very much about direct. If people in communities have access to knowledge and insights about them, they are more able to take direct change in their lives and their family lives and in their communities. There is something about nuance and subtlety here. If we speak the same language, either literally like another language or figuratively like jargon or slang, we have the same codes and shortcuts as I understand what you're saying and you're not needing to code switch or try to make me understand or make me feel comfortable as opposed to being able to share your story in your way. I first came across this particular method from Jenny Kelly and colleagues who have this fabulous article 'Makes you proud to be black eh? Reflexes on meaningful Indigenous research participation.' In many ways the process used is of greater importance. So some examples across four domains, mental health, ageing, driving and parenting. So the first one is from the Australian centre for social invasion. There was a foundation in SA and the project idea came about from meeting this young person on the right-hand side of the screen called Diana at a mental health first-aid training. Having worked in mental health for a while, I was really overcome by the resilience, the strength and the capacity of Diana and what they had endured over their life and the sort of tacit and knowledge they had from that. And I could see that Diana had this extraordinary capacity to contribute but perhaps due to age and status might have been only seen as a participant in someone else's research as opposed to someone who has the capacity it lead something themselves. So I pitched was to say if we got a group of young people who have lifted experience of mental health and suicide to learn from each other and develop unique responses based on that learning and they would be the ones leading that and that might be alternatives to our current system. This particular photo is obviously some time on. It's of Diana and another inside gatherer called Josh standing outside of an emergency department in SA where they have gone in and pitched some ideas for how the emergency response could be better for people who are experiencing mental distress. And all of that was about us getting out of the way, supporting them, deferring to their lived experience and them building their leadership capacity so they can step directly into these spaces. We are asking people for their help. We are valuing what they can contribute and then we're getting out of the way so they can exercise their leadership. The second example here is a piece of work that colleagues did in Aotearoa, the innovation unit or used to be called Innovate Change. This was about rates of young people driving without the correct licence in a community in south Auckland and a community that is predominantly made up of Pacific and Maori families. There was an assumption that young people were naughty and they drove without the correct licence because they just broke the law. So we weren't sure that that was what
7. 7 was going on. So we recruited a group of insight gatherers. I think there was about 20 of them across all ages, including young people, older people, police, local service providers and they went out into community and had conversations about, well, what is going on around driving in this community? What are young people's experiences of driving, of the driver licensing system, what is helping them gain a licence, what's getting in the way? Now, unsurprisingly what we heard back was not that young people were naughty but rather that there were a set of cultural and social norms that were asking people to drive without a licence. Please take Nana to the shops or you have to take your brother to school. So our response therefore was really different based on getting this insight from community. And that group of insight gatherers became absolutely instrumental all the way through the project to be advocating but also to already be making changes in their lives and communities without waiting for the design process to be over for a service or a program to be put in place. And this absolutely incredible woman standing here, Val, which you meet in this video where insight gatherers are talking, led the solution. We found Val in the insight gathering. She bubbled as this community connector and meeting her through this style of research we were able to build up her capacity to lead a solution directly in her community. There is a video here that I won't show you today but there's a link of all of the insight gatherers speaking about what they heard. It's a really crappy video. It was shot on a mobile phone yet it ended up going to the Minister who made different funding decisions based on the video. As you will see, the power of someone from community talking about their experience is so much more powerful than an outsider, researcher or politician speak about that. There would have been an extraordinary power differential if myself and colleagues, both young, white, fairly privileged had gone into community to talk about experiences that we have never had. In the next one in SA, to review the outcomes of the State ageing policy, this was last year, we recruited a group of older people and younger people to go out and speak to older people in their lives, particularly from groups who are less likely to age well. Whether that be LBGT people, culturally and linguistically diverse, older people living with disabilities, also survivors of institutional trauma. From hearing from a diverse range of voices, we got clear and compelling insights that have now informed the State ageing strategy for SA. And, finally, when it comes to parenting, this is a particular project that we ran in west Auckland. Where we were interested in supporting parents of under fives and particularly looking at the relationship between parental stress and isolation and child abuse and neglect. So in the same way we got together a group of parents to be insight gatherers to talk to other parents about their experiences. And unsurprisingly, as I mentioned before, that minimised some of the shame and pain about having experiences of isolation, of poverty, of stress, of adverse mental health and feeling quite supported knowing you are speaking to another parent in the same setting. Once again through that process we met this super powerful, amazing woman called Karryn who also went on to be one of the main
8. 8 people leading the solution. So the things that happened across all those projects is insight gatherers became leaders and advocates. There was really high ownership, input and connection. And those were all in places that were already over saturated. They could have said we have lots of research but us having lots of research and community having knowledge about themselves often are two separate things. We got heaps of nuance out of all this. It wasn't homogenous or mono cultural as can sometimes or often happen. Because people were dealing with their stories, the stories of their friends and family, there is a high level of sensitivity and a low level of stigma. Sometimes unfortunately when very privileged designers and researchers write-up people's stories, without being part of those communities they unfortunately end up stigmatising people or focusing too much on the disadvantages and not enough about how people actually define their own lives and the strengths and resilience and resources they have. And all those projects, people took action on the findings already in their lives without waiting for programs or services. And people had heaps of pride about this. They had new skills and new perspectives on old issues. From a quick tip perspective, it is essential in these spaces that we tap into people's desire to contribute and, of course, that we recognise that contribution financially, socially and we attribute their work. So we often talk about reaching into places with recruitment techniques that are really sensitive and compassionate. And I think sometimes we talk about this without giving specific examples of what that would look like. So I want to show you a video from a dear friend and colleague Kotsona Davis on a project we did around diabetes. We recognised people felt reasonably shamed by the health system around their illness and diabetes disproportionately affects Maori and Pacific families. So I will show you this now. (Video audio unavailable) What you would have seen is the level of sensitivity and compassion when we work through more relational ways of recruiting and when we work through people that are more like us and can be more affirming. Overall, we have to recruit for the diversity that we want to reach. So what that means in practice, and if I take the State ageing example as a particular story about this, the department already had a group of story gatherers. And those story gatherers, whilst fantastic, were all middle class, white and had reasonably high resources to be able to age well. And unsurprisingly that meant that they weren't necessarily connected into parts of community that weren't able to age well or people with diverse identities, backgrounds and experiences. So when we came in to do a separate piece of work, we had to turn that on its head and say actually our insight gatherers themselves need to be quite diverse and they need to be connected to the people and families that we are trying to reach. And let's be really, really explicit about that. Because if our insight gatherers aren't diverse, it's unlikely their networks will be. One of the things we often talk about in social innovation work is kind of interventions that we can make. Like, what would an intervention be to increase people's social connectedness. The research process itself
9. 9 can be an intervention and how we do a process can increase that if it's done in some way. Instead of just recruiting older people as insight gatherers, we also recruited younger people because the department had a strategy around increasing intergenerational connections. Through our research approach itself, we also wanted to increase intergenerational connections and build sort of a mutual exchange between older people and younger people about what it would take for us all to age well in Australia. So in terms of bringing people together and training them and building up their capacity, I think as researchers we can sort of jump to everyone needs to know everything. Or how are we going to teach these hyper specialised skill sets to people. You're not going to do that and people will not reach the level of specialisation that you have reached in your practice and that's OK because the purpose of this is to work really relationally and to hear things that perhaps even ourselves as good as we are at rapport and questioning. So as you bring people together, you are aiming first and foremost to build the social connections in that group and use simple tools to help people understand the difference between a regular conversation and an insight conversation. And really simply one that I often use is to draw out two massive circles on the floor that are overlapping and ask people to move between the different circles talking about what they are going to take with them into the insight gathering conversation and what they're going to leave behind. I also use a particular tool that comes from the eight ways of Aboriginal learning which is to use learning maps as opposed to detailed documentation. People will always lose detailed documentation if you give it to them and it would take away from the relational present conversation that we're wanting them to have with each other. So a learning map is about using sort of symbols and simple constructs to spell out where is it you're trying to go in your conversation and provide simple sign posts for people. It's really important that insight gatherers have the chance to tell their own stories. So everyone comes into something like this with a bank of experiences that they themselves have had and sometimes when we ask people to go out into community and talk to each other, they haven't done that work to set that stuff to the side. So when you're bringing people together, they have to have the chance to share their own stories. But to also see that their story and their experience may not be the same as the stories and experiences that they are trying to hear. When people are out in the field per se or really their normal lives talking to each other, as a research team or a support team, we are trying to check in and to constantly be debriefing and having sense making conversations. That also allows people to flag anything that felt uncomfortable, unsafe or they're not quite sure of where their duty of care sits as a friend. We are constantly checking and rechecking people's comprehension of the task at hand. I've sometimes had insight gatherers think that they were going out to have a conversation with themselves, which is interesting. It needed to have conversations about no, you are wanting
10. 10 to speak to others. As I mentioned, don't leave insight gatherers in the field for too long. We lose momentum, we lose pace and people lose anything they have captured. When you bring people back together for the analogies jam, it's important to low down. We do so much rushing in designer research and I understand that in a commercial setting there are reasons for that. However, in a social setting we have to meet people's social needs alongside debriefing, sense making and analysis and synthesis all whilst practicing hospitality at the same time. To do that I like to draw on body techniques as well as visual and minimise the amount of writing people are doing, particularly on post-it notes. We are looking for clear meta force of symbols to explain what they've heard as opposed to coming up with massive lists of insights. We are looking to bolster leaders. Finally, there is a job we have to do in terms of elevating what has been learnt through a process and that's not about letting the inviting others to come and contribute and learn from but also about building the pride of the group of people that have done this work. So this is an example from Aotearoa from the innovation unit in a project called Generations which is about older people ageing well, where the group of insight gatherers went out, collect some fabulous insights and then the innovation unit created this beautiful kind of event that was tailored and curated with these huge beautiful posters and older people themselves telling the stories both of their own lives but also what they heard from community. And to those events were invited politicians, service providers, young people, all who could get around the conversation that has been had and find ways they themselves might be able to contribute to or to make change based on the insights. So as Wendell Berry suggests to us, nobody can discover the world for anyone else. It's only after we've discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone. So what I'm suggesting here when it comes to social research, when it comes to communities that have historically been spoken about rather than with and partnered with, that we move from can we do research to should we. And if we should, in what ways would be most affirming. And from your perspective, are you the right person or the best person to be having conversations. And if you're not, then who might be? Thank you so much for your time and attention. I will finish here.