Community engagement is recognized as a valuable and ethical component of health science research and its inclusion is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for research funding and approvals. In general terms, community engagement aims to foster the interchange of perspectives, opinions, and ideas and promote the co-production of knowledge between researchers, research participants, and other stakeholders. Community engagement initiatives are often designed with the intention of enabling exchanges of this nature.

This e-book explores approaches taken by engagement practitioners, engagement scholars, social scientists, and researchers to promote listening and responding to community voices in research processes. It seeks to understand the challenges that obstruct meaningful integration of community voices in research design and responsiveness to expressions of needs and aspirations for change, in low-and-middle-income countries. The Research Topic draws experience from numerous majority world countries and explores multiple global health challenges and research approaches.
Chair: Dr Gill Black | Sustainable Livilihoods Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa
Speakers:
Dr Gary Hickey | Senior Research Manager, National Institute for Health and Care Research, UK
Dr Kay Polidano | Resident academic in the Department of Sociology, University of Malta, Malta
Cai Ngoc Thien Huong | Research Coordinator, Oxford University Clinical research Unit, Vietnam
Dr Alun Davies | Senior post doctoral researcher, Health Systems Collaborative, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK, and KEMRI-Wellcome Research Programme, Kenya.