InPart Blog

‘Patient engagement in drug development: moving beyond tools and standardization?’ Overview of a multi-stakeholder dialogue

Claudia Egher

Dec 12, 2022

On November 18, Dr. Claudia Egher together with the InPart team organized the multi-stakeholder hybrid workshop “Patient engagement in drug development: moving beyond tools and standardization?” at the Maastricht University Campus Brussels. The goal of the event was to stimulate dialogue on patient representation in drug development, on the performative effects of the tools and materials that are currently available in this area, and on how to ensure their broad and responsible dissemination.

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Doing Ethnography in Times of War, Political Instability, or the Apocalypse

Arturs Holavins (Artur Kholiavin)

Jul 25, 2022

Pic. 1. Ivangorod-Narva border crossing (source: Google Images) I pushed a metallic gate and entered the “grey zone” between Russia and Estonia, holding my daughter in my hands. I had passed through these gates dozens of times before. Usually, a routine thing to do. Once, at the same border crossing, I even failed to cross back to Europe due to visa irregularities. A minor inconvenience borderline with a funny adventure back in my happy doctoral studies years.

Word Count: 1500

Unseen participation? Impressions from the project panel on EASST conference

Olga Zvonareva

Jul 9, 2022

On July 7th, the panel “Unseen participation? When the uninvited shape matters of collective concern” took place during the EASST-2022 conference. The InPart project team convened this panel to explore practices of participation under adverse circumstances. The panel drew on an understanding that participation can go beyond talk-based and officially-designated formats. For a long time, studies of participation have focused on more formal, organised, and staged participatory events. The main line of analysis has been to check how a specific participatory exercise measures up to particular democratic ideals.

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Fugitive coproduction: Conceptualising informal community practices in Scotland's hospitals. A presentation by Dr. Ellen Stewart

Anastasia Stoli

Jun 7, 2022

On June the 1st, Dr. Ellen Stewart kindly agreed to give an online presentation of her recently published article titled “Fugitive coproduction: Conceptualising informal community practices in Scotland’s hospitals”. Dr. Stewart is a social scientist, currently working at the university of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, as a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer on Social Work and Policy. As a scholar, she has engaged with a variety of topics, including medical sociology, health policy and public administration.

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What Ethnographers Do In The Shadows, Or Why Researchers Matter For The Research

Arturs Holavins (Artur Kholiavin)

May 21, 2022

A participatory ideal of critical social research is having a research participant at the forefront of the research narrative (Grover, 2004; Jack, 2010; Bergold and Thomas, 2012; Singh, Richmond, Burnes, 2013). A researcher is a subjective mediator translating research participants’ experiences into the “scientific” narrative. Yet, this “subjectivity” is a matter of rather technical self-criticism (Fox, 2004, p. 1). We are powerholders in relations with research participants, critics of “positivist” epistemologies in social science say (hard to argue with that).

Word Count: 2500

'You-Know-What': Why many scholars study informality but call it differently? The exploration of the politics behind the concept

Maria Denisova

Nov 26, 2021

Back to my master’s, I remembered a conversation with the professor about the PhD project on informality in health care I was applying to. She was intrigued by the informality concept explaining she has never encountered it before. What is informality? Is it about the unofficial labour market? Is it about grey economies? I hesitated to answer and mumbled, ‘‘well, it covers all these things’’. Reflecting on this conversation later, I was still uncertain how to explain the origins of informality as a field in social sciences, but I kept digging in.

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