This intermediate session looks at how physical presence and performance can influence engagement in health research services. By the end of this session, learners should be able to describe the concept of critical reflexivity, describe the concept of embodied reflexivity, and discuss why bodies matter in patient and public engagement.

1. MEETING PEOPLE WHERE THEY’RE AT:
THE IMPORTANCE OF TRAUMA-INFORMED
ENGAGEMENT

2. Agenda
• What is critical reflexive practice and why is it important to
engagement
• The difference between discursive and embodied
reflexivity
• What is embodied reflexivity
• How do we incorporate it into engagement practice

3. Critical Reflexive Practice
• An understanding of how our own personal values,
experiences, interests, beliefs and political
commitments shape the area of health we research; and
• An examination of how these values and experiences
relate to social and structural locations we personally
inhabit as well as larger processes and systems of
power and oppression.

4. A Special Note on Quantitative Research
“Statistics are powerful persuaders. As systematically collected
numerical facts, they do much more than summarize reality in
numbers. They also interpret reality and influence the way we
understand society. The researchers who create statistics leave
their mark on them – not just because people are biased in overt or
conscious ways, but also because social, cultural, economic, and
political perspectives infuse the research data even when we think
we are “just counting people.””
• Walter M. & Andersen C. (2013). Indigenous Statistics: A
Quantitative Research Methodology. pp. 7.

5. Reflexivity
Reflexivity is the practice of continuous reflection by all
members of the research team (researchers and patient
partners) regarding their own values, preconceptions, and
behaviour, recognizing the impact they may have on the
research process, including interpretation of findings, as
well as research team relationships.

6. Critical Reflexive Practice
• Discursive reflexivity
• Embodied reflexivity

7. Examples of Discursive Reflexive Practice
• What are my own personal values,
experiences, interests, beliefs and
political commitments in the area of
health we will be researching?
• How do these personal experiences
relate to social locations and
processes of oppression in the area
of health in which we will be
researching?

8. Critical Reflexive Practice
• What are my personal values,
assumptions, perspectives and
experiences with regard to people
living with the health issues in
which we will be researching?
• What current health inequities
exist with regard to the area of
health in which we will be
researching?

9. Embodied Reflexivity
• Looking at how a researcher’s physical presence and
performance can influence public and patient partners’
sharing of their experiential knowledge, and in turn the
production of knowledge

10. Why is Embodied Reflexivity Important?
• Stories about our bodies are mediated through our social
location, and it’s not only about understanding the
materiality of bodies but also the sociality of health and
embodiment in order to be truly innovative and address
health inequities

11. The Construction of Particular Narratives
• How we think, communicate and experience our bodies is
produced, policed and reconstituted by social institutions
including media, government, medicine, education, laws,
etc.
– Disability
– Gendered and racialized bodies
– Differing body sizes

12. The Production of Knowledge
• Thinking of the context in which stories of the body are
shared

13. Silent Ways Bodies are Imbued with Power
• Trust is built between two people through the incremental
and mutual sharing of vulnerabilities.
• Addressing the sometimes silent ways in which our
bodies can be imbued with power and privilege by
systems of oppression
• Working to ensure embodied silences cannot negatively
affect research relationships

14. Being aware of one’s own emotions and bodily states
• Researchers must also hold themselves accountable for
how their bodies impact sharing of experiences and the
knowledge they impart.

15. Understanding what these states reveal about you and
potentially the patient/public partner
• Emotions are embodied experiences that can reveal how
bodies are entwined with the experiences of others.

16. Acknowledging how nonverbal communication
contributes to the co-construction of knowledge
• Body memory- perhaps practice or performance that has
been embedded in a researcher’s physicality – can
suddenly be cued by the physical, emotional, and social
interaction between the researcher and public or patient
partner

17. Recognizing that our identities are multiple and
complex
• Researchers and public and patient partners both carry
and embody a complex history of lived experiences and
identities that are inseparable.

18. Appreciating how socially constructed differences can
impact on the interactions between researchers and
public or patient partners
• When researchers understand how their social location is
inscribed upon the materiality of their bodies and
influences their bodily performance, they can then begin
to collaboratively challenge the social construction of
difference.

19. The Body Discloses
• Embodied research means reflecting on the very
presence of both researcher’s and public or patient
partner’s bodies in the research process.

20. The Body is Prime Site of Silences
• To reflect upon bodily presence and interactions means to
address ‘the elephant in the room’