Heidi Kaspar, grantee of Virtual Mobility in Grant Period 2
Bio:
I am a professor for participatory health care research at the Bern University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland. As a social and health geographer my particular interest lies in caring spaces and practices across the globe and locally. More recently, I have been exploring the nexus between care and participatory approaches in projects initiating caring communities to support healthy aging.
Grant supported actions and initiatives:
The VR grant “Impact of Participatory Approaches with Older Adults on Ageism: scoping review protocol” pursued three objectives:
- to integrate scientific knowledge across relevant disciplines in the field of ageing studies on the impact of participatory approaches with older adults on ageism,
- to integrate scientific and experiential expertise to conceptualize a scoping review relevant for the scientific community and older co-creators, and
- to test and evaluate the Public Involvement in Research Impact Toolkit (PIRIT) as an instrument to practice meaningful participation.
The grant allowed me to tackle organizational issues with public involvement and time to reflect on how to carefully working with contributions from older adults that allows for ‘deep integration’ – I’d like to call it ingraining – of experiential knowledge into research. I draw a two-fold conclusion: The tool works as a forceful prompt to not just collect and put aside contributions but to sit down and work with them, exploring what they mean to the endeavor and why they matter. Therefore, the tool reliably works as a ‘deceleration and give space to thinking machine’. As the tool is intended to be shared with all contributors it furthermore allows sharing and providing visibility to the proceedings of contributions provided.
In short, the grant allowed me to experience the value of ‘ingraining’ public contributions (compared to collecting them) and the use of PIRIT in doing so.