Scepticism, Activism & Healthy Communities: A Centric-HS Project

We are thrilled to announce a new and exciting project with the London-based community organisation Centric, funded by the King’s Together scheme at King’s College, London and led by Shaun Danquah, Paul Addae with Caitjan Gainty and Agnes Arnold-Forster, and including collaborators Andrew Blick, Sarah Dorrington, Alix Mortimer, Guddi Singh, Anne Marie Rafferty, Marcus Tayebwa, Muhammed Rauf, Lucas Canino and Emily Morrison. The project aims to better hear, know, and understand the sceptical voices of Brixton, a predominantly black, South London community. It intends to model a way of doing research into health scepticism, where the sceptic and her community remain firmly at the centre. This is not an attempt to develop greater trust for healthcare within the community; it instead takes as its aim understanding what a sceptical community can offer to conversations about where healthcare has gone wrong and how it can be made right. In other words, the goal is not to change the community, but to change healthcare. To get a taste of the kind of work Centric does around the areas of medical scepticism especially, we recommend this excellent blog post by Shaun Danquah and Marcus Tayebwa. Please see below for more on the project.

Project Description

Over the course of the pandemic, Britain’s problem with health inequality has finally received widespread attention. Not only have people from Black and Asian ethnic groups been disproportionately affected by Covid-19, but public health interventions have fractured along racial lines. The relatively high rates of vaccine hesitancy among some Black communities has exposed pre-existing problems with healthcare access in the UK, and a past and present of institutionalised racism. 

This project starts from the assumption that there are good historical and contemporary reasons why Black communities in Britain might be sceptical about healthcare and seeks to challenge the assumption that those hesitant about vaccines are irrational, illogical, or prone to conspiratorial thinking. Rather than viewing health scepticism as a reflection of individual flaws, we understand it to be a measure of how well healthcare works. We are interested in bringing sceptical and activist voices from the Black community into the mainstream and exploring what they might tell us about where healthcare has gone wrong, how it has failed its constituent communities, and why it has sown discord and distrust rather than engendering faith and allegiance.  

To do this, we are partnering with The Social Innovation Partnership (TSIP), a community research group based in Brixton, South London. This is a culturally diverse community, whose residents have roots in Trinidad, Jamaica, Nigeria, Somalia, Eritrea, the Congo, and elsewhere. It is also a sceptical and activist community: a community that has become a rich counter-public space for various historical reasons, both specific to this urban locale and reflective of the larger history of racism and inequality in the UK. It is a community for whom mainstream healthcare is not automatically or uniformly taken up. It is a community with a rich history of health activism and alternatives to formalized structures of healthcare. 

One goal of the project is to better hear, know, and understand the sceptical voices of this one, predominantly black, South London community. Another, is to model a way of doing research into health scepticism, where the sceptic and their community remain firmly at the centre. Thus, this will not be an attempt to develop greater trust for healthcare within the community; it will instead be a study of what a sceptical community can offer to conversations about where healthcare has gone wrong and how it can be made right. In other words, the goal is not to change the community, but to change healthcare. 

TSIP houses a new community organisation called Centric, which is developing a new community research methodology. Centric employs and equips community members with the skills required to conduct research for community members, and with community members. As part of our project, we will be providing training to these community members in policymaking, news media engagement, how healthcare systems currently function, and historical research methodologies. The active research will then be carried out independently. They will keep the project team updated as to their findings, but retain ownership over the data and outputs. At the end of the pilot project, these same community researchers will return to upskill us and our target audiences: healthcare professionals, journalists, and policymakers. 

Because of Centric’s positioning in and of the community, it can tap into the community’s cultural nuances as well as inviting in the so-called ‘hard to reach’ members whose voices are not normally accessed by those in the mainstream. As it is also for the community, Centric performs the critical task of safeguarding the community from the sometimes-predatory data extraction methodologies of even the best-meaning researchers and ensures that its findings are relevant, meaningful and stay local to the community itself.

This project is not only about gathering and analysing data so that we know Brixton’s sceptics and activists better. It is also about taking their critiques of healthcare seriously, as legitimate and critical markers of where they have been failed by conventional healthcare methods and/or fulfilled by health alternatives. 

 This is a pilot exploring the possibilities for a fundamental rethink of healthcare as we also explore new methods for community engagement and the re-orientation of our healthcare thinking more generally toward community need. It is also the start of a new kind of collaboration between community organisation and academic institutions which we see as an innovative next step toward what the Healthy Scepticism project has had as a goal: to translate research into action.