Our first workshop

It was great to meet each other (although still online rather than face-to-face unfortunately) at our first workshop last week.

The aim of the workshop was to learn more about each other and start to generate ideas about how we might conduct research together in the area of menstrual and mental health.

By the end of the workshop, we initially aimed to have:

• A list of (roughly prioritised) research questions/ideas
• A list of potential stakeholders (people who would be interested in and/or benefit from our research) to invite to the next workshop (in September)

Through lots of interesting talks and discussions, we got some way to achieving these aims, and we also had a much better idea of how we might work together on collaborative research. The main outcome was that we identified a need to develop specific themes to focus on. We each have broad interests, and a broad range of stakeholders might be interested in different aspects of our research. We need to develop focussed themes, but take care to achieve a balance around focus vs multidisciplinarity (i.e., we don’t want to make themes based around disciplines – that would defeat the point of multidisciplinary research!). Once we have a better idea of general themes, we’ll have a better idea of which stakeholders to invite to our stakeholder workshop in September. We’re looking forward to this workshop – we all agree that it will be important to involve stakeholders in co-designing research relatively early, before ideas are fully developed. 

An illustrator, Laura Sorvala, summarised each day of our first workshop as a “live-scribe” from recordings. We’re so happy with how these turned out! We hope to have Laura involved in our future workshops, and we can highly recommend her for other academic meetings. We were so impressed with how quickly she produced this work and how accurately she summarised our workshop – much nicer and more engaging than boring typed minutes!