Telling care-full stories? Exploring how we can use the insights of our work to help build and sustain cultures of care in animal research
Telling care-full stories? Exploring how we can use the insights of our work to help build and sustain cultures of care in animal research
Leading research organisations, such as the UK’s Wellcome Trust (2020), recognise there is a need to create a more care-full and supportive working environment in the UK research sector. Research leaders and regulators recognise that in order to minimise the impacts of animal research on both animals and the humans who work with them, and to ensure the best quality science, it is essential to promote a good culture of care in animal research facilities (Home Office Animals in Science Regulation Unit Compliance Policy, December 2017). Having a good culture of care is widely recognised as being key to the welfare of both staff and animals in animal research facilities, and to the quality of the science produced (Boden & Hawkins, 2016).
Research conducted by members of the AnNex team and their collaborators has highlighted how existing infrastructures and training provision within animal research facilities, while sensitive to the need to promote a good culture of care, are currently struggling to meet the gap between formal mechanisms of delivery and the more open, deliberative, cross-cutting conversations needed to really articulate shared meanings, values and experiences of care (K. Davies & Lewis, 2010; Greenhough & Roe, 2018; Hawkins, 2018; Robinson et al., 2019; Friese & Latimer, 2019; Tremoleda and Kerton, 2021).
Spending over 8 years studying the social relations around animal research work and working with staff from across the animal research sector has offered me valuable insights into the issues people working in the sector face, as well as the benefits of the opportunity to share experiences qualitative research can create. In particular, I have found that for animal technologists and facility managers, sharing stories about their relationships with individual animals they had worked with served as a way of thinking through the ethical and emotional challenges of their work, including what counts as good care (Greenhough and Roe 2019). Inspired by this, between December 2019 and March 2021 Hibba Mazhary and I brought together a group of key stakeholders in the animal research community and creative professional Ida Persson, to design and pilot a new training resource, successfully demonstrating how storytelling offers an innovative approach to teaching a culture of care.
The training resource currently consists of a set of instructions for facilitators, (with a suggested agenda, warm up exercises and discussions points, as well as advice on creating a safe space for discussion) and a series of four different scripts users can select from. In the session, volunteers read out the scripts, ideally taking on roles different to their usual position in the workplace, and then collectively participants talk through a series of discussion points the script was designed to raise. The resource is designed to be adaptable to the specific needs of the group using it, and to be used ‘off the peg’ by those providing training in the sector. Despite some delays and challenges resulting from the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, including the need to move to online delivery, feedback from pilot studies conducted so far has been overwhelmingly positive. (A copy of the project report is available on request). With the support of the sector, and further funding from the University of Oxford ESRC Impact Acceleration Awards, we are now keen to use this feedback to further develop and professionally produce, publish and disseminate the resource. The long-term aim of this work is to see the Care-full Stories resource adopted into training programmes at animal research establishments across the UK and Europe and endorsed by recognised professional bodies.
Personally, this is some of the most rewarding work I have undertaken as part of the AnNex project. Being able to share the methods and findings of our work in a way which creates space, in turn, for our stakeholders to share and reflect on their experiences and concerns is both a joy and a privilege, and I look forward to continuing to develop this work and its impact over the next few years. Look out for an update on our work at next year’s IAT Congress.