Community-based research and open science: lessons learned

In 2024, KT Connects is focusing on open science — the practice of making scientific inputs, outputs, and processes freely available to all with minimal restrictions. Learn more

Webinar summary

Friday, May 24 

12 – 1 p.m. PST 

Open science and community-based research are complementary. They both stem from the recognition of needed change to the ‘status quo’, and that requires collective efforts. For 2S/LGBTQQIA+ health research, community-based approaches to research are vitally important. They bring to life the motto “nothing about us without us” (coined by disability rights activists).

This month’s guest speakers are Dr. Nathan Lachowsky from the University of Victoria and Anu Radha Verma from the Community-Based Research Centre (www.cbrc.net). The centre promotes the health of people of diverse sexualities and genders through research and intervention development. In this presentation, Nathan and Anu Radha will share how community-based research is an example of open science in practice – through case studies of learnings, which cover lessons from both success and failure.

Learning objectives

After this webinar, the audience will be able to:

1. Identify principles for community-based research that relate to 2S/LGBTQQIA+ communities.
2. Describe how open science and community-based research are complementary approaches.
3. Understand the successes and challenges of implementing community-based research with and for 2S/LGBTQQIA+ communities.

Speaker bio

Nathan Lachowsky (he/him) is an uninvited settler researcher of Ukrainian and British descent. He is an associate professor in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria and research director at the Community-Based Research Centre. Championing interdisciplinary and community-based approaches, he has conducted population health research with sexual and gender-minoritized communities – particularly Indigenous Two-Spirit and Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, Transgender, and Queer people across Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. His research focuses on social and behavioural epidemiology. and the importance of developing and analyzing mixed methods data to inform public health practice, health service provision, interventions and policy.

Anu Radha Verma (she/her) is an associate director of research at the Community-Based Research Centre (CBRC). Her work at CBRC has been focused on chronic health, conversion practices, anti-racism, and gender-based violence. Anu Radha has lived and worked in both so-called Canada and India, focuses on social justice issues relating to the environment, health, gender and sexuality, poverty, youth, migration, disability and more. She is a queer, diasporic woman of colour with complex connections to ‘South Asia’, a mad-identified survivor, and navigates chronic fatigue while living on the Treaty and Traditional Territory of the Mississauga’s of the Credit. Outside of CBRC, she is a curator, organizes with a grassroots QTBIPOC group, and is engaged in archival work documenting histories of activism in the suburbs.