Gemma Aellah is an anthropologist working at the University of Sussex. Throughout her academic career she has specialised in this process of democratising research. Together with a small team from the University, she has worked with TLM’s teams to train a group of 15 peer researchers from Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. Half of them are persons affected by leprosy who work for The Leprosy Mission and half are leprosy champions from the community.
As Gemma explains, “Training is the most important step in this process. We made a point to do this in person at a retreat in Goa and to do as much of it in Hindi as possible.
“You don’t need to spend too much time on academic theory, you just need to train them in the process for research. How do you define your research question? How do you find answers? What does it mean to conduct research, whether through interviews or data collection and analysis?
“We did this through practical experience. Anthropology is about getting yourself in the mindset of observation, so one of the exercises we did was to go on a walk around a church in Goa and ask people to write up what they observed. We also did an exercise called ‘rivers of life’. We asked people to talk about what had happened to get them to this point in their lives, helping each of them to see how their journeys and their experiences of their journeys differed.”
