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Together We Create
Together We Create is a podcast series from the Collaborative Social Science Domain in which researchers share their stories, reflections and top tips on collaborating with engineers, scientists, health practitioners, and designers and others, and discuss the benefits and challenges of taking a collaborative interdisciplinary approach to research.
Series 1
In Series 1 UCL's Early Career Researchers discuss their expereinces of interdisciplinary partnerships on a wide range of projects from the oportunities created by digital health interventions to better understaning the social lives of computer programmers. Six epidisodes are available here.
A summary of topics is given below; scroll down this page for further details and links for each podcast.
- Episode 1: Introducing Together We Create
- Episode 2: Building relationships for interdisciplinary and collaborative research
- Episode 3: Towards meaningful interdisciplinary working in digital health research
- Episode 4: Collaborating to ensure buildings and cities are relevant to local communities
- Episode 5: The social life of programmers
- Episode 6: Studying children’s interactions from an interdisciplinary perspective
The Together We Create series was hosted by Lili Golmohammadi (PhD candidate with the IN-TOUCH project, UCL Knowledge Lab) and produced by Cerys Bradley.
Episode 1: Introducing Together We Create
This episode introduces the Together We Create series which explores the collaborative social research being undertaken by Early Career Researchers at UCL. It sets the scene for the series by highlighting how social researchers collaborate with other disciplines, organisations, and communities, showcasing the range of this work, from collaborating with deep ocean scientists and fishing communities to protect the environment, to co-creating new apps with computer scientist to better support our health, to collaborating with designers to rethink how technology can help people to communicate, and why collaborative social science matters.
Episode 2: Building relationships for interdisciplinary and collaborative research
We often take for granted that collaborative research is dependent on relationships, which can mean that we understate the skill and intention required to create fruitful partnerships. Hear about how researchers can be intentional and strategic about building mutually beneficial and equitable collaborations.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr Michel Wahome, who joined UCL in 2021 as a lecturer in the Department of Science & Technology Studies. Before becoming an academic, Michel worked as an innovation and science policy advisor in a variety of Non-Governmental Organisations, including the New York Academy of Sciences. Michel holds a MSc in science and environmental policy and she was awarded her PhD, an analysis of the practices of digital start-up entrepreneurs in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2020 from the University of Edinburgh, and she has held research positions at Oxford and Strathclyde Universities.
Read the transcript for Episode 2 here.
Links
Episode 3: Towards meaningful interdisciplinary working in digital health research
Digital health interventions are rapidly growing and offer unique advantages compared with face-to-face interventions, including their ability to deliver tailored support to users, as and when needed. The development, optimisation, evaluation, and real-world implementation of digital health interventions requires expertise from researchers, allied professionals and end-users working across diverse fields, such as behavioural science, medicine, computer science, and human-computer interaction.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr Olga Perski a collaborative social researcher and practitioner health psychologist working in digital health. Olga was training to be a classical musician, but in 2014, following an internship in a Stockholm clinic, she joined UCL to study for a MSc in Health Psychology, then a PhD and in 2018 Olga took up a Research post in the UCL Tobacco & Alcohol research group in the department of Behavioural Science and Health.
Read the transcript for Episode 3 here.
Links
Episode 4: Collaborating to ensure buildings and cities are relevant to local communities
In this episode, we are joined by Dr Alejandra Albuerne. Alejandra is an architectural engineer who has worked in Spain and the UK. In 2016 she completed her PhD at Oxford University across Engineering Science and Archaeology. Before this Alejandra worked for structural engineering and architectural firms for nine years. She joined UCL in 2017 as a Lecturer in Sustainable Heritage at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, UCL. Alejandra’s work combines engineering skills and knowledge with cultural and social studies to address the complex challenge of conserving heritage and recovering after a disaster, an earth-quake for example.
Read the transcript for Episode 4 here.
Links
Episode 5: The social life of programmers
Computer applications dominate contemporary social life, but who are the programmers who build these applications and what cultural values do they share? Combining the knowledge of programming with training in anthropology is one way of trying to understand the social life of programmers.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr Gui Heurich. Gui studied anthropology in Brazil. In 2016 he joined UCL Social Anthropology with a British Academy Newton International Fellowship. In 2019 he retrained as a professional software engineer. But in 2020 Gui returned to UCL with a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship.
Read the transcript for Episode 5 here.
Links
Episode 6: Studying children’s interactions from an interdisciplinary perspective
Digital communication technologies can transform interactions for children with severe speech and physical impairments and their social partners. In this podcast, we hear about how interdisciplinary perspectives can help to guide how we study these interactions by drawing on speech and language therapy practice, human computer interaction and multimodal communication.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr Seray Ibrahim a collaborative social researcher who investigates the communication of children with severe speech and physical impairments. She asks how technologies can be designed in new ways to foreground the many different resources that people use to communicate. Her aim is to bring children's views into the design process to improve the communication technologies that are available to them. Before becoming a researcher Seray worked as a Speech and Language Therapist in UK National Health Service hospital and community settings. She was awarded her PhD at UCL in 2019, and in 2020 she received a prestigious post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Read the transcript for Episode 6 here.