By Victoria Foster, Team UK
I am a champion of civic engagement, of exploring the university’s role in its local place and of doing research that aims to enhance that place. As such, I have carried out a wide range of projects with marginalised groups in Northwest England, UK. Exploring Adaptive Capacity and Democratic Performance is the first international research project I have worked on, and initially I wondered how rewarding this would be given my commitment to working locally.
I am leading the UK team, and, in some respects, the day-to-day research activity is similar to other projects I’ve worked on. We have chosen to focus the first phase of our project on Greater Manchester, an area I am very familiar with. We have managed to recruit nineteen third sector organisations to the project. These are organisations that work with vulnerable people in the domains of food security, mental health, substance misuse and domestic violence. We have been exploring the challenges they faced during the Covid-19 pandemic and how they met them. Of course, they have continued to face challenges post pandemic, with the landscape having changed quite significantly and their services being as much in demand as ever. In the UK we are feeling the effects of many things post-Covid as the rest of the world, inflation, and the fallout from international conflict. These have also been accompanied with the reverberations from exiting the European Union.
And this is where it has started to become interesting and exciting to be working as an international team. Each country has lived through the Covid-19 pandemic, with so many similarities and yet differences in its response. And each country is now facing its own set of challenges. For instance, Poland has welcomed over 15 million Ukrainian refugees in the past two years and so in Warsaw – one of the locations of our research – the population has grown significantly, putting immense pressure on the services we are exploring. As we start to compare the data we are collecting, it is becoming more and more evident that the organisations we are working with have much in common with each other, despite the continually shifting ground. As we start our comparative analysis, I am looking forward to being able to share the learning with our local organisations. There is going to be much value to the local community in being able to see the bigger picture.
Comentarios