Facilitation · King's College London
Mentoring Research Leadership on Stigma, Power and Intersectionality
““I want to try and do my work… respecting other people, their knowledge and experience.” — research lead”
The challenge
A team researching stigma wanted to examine the power it held within its own research relationships
Researchers can study stigma, exclusion and inequality while still benefiting from university status, professional authority and institutional systems that place some forms of knowledge above others. The team wanted sustained space to explore positionality and intersectionality through the actual decisions involved in leading a project, not as a one-off statement added to a protocol.
What we did
Team mentoring developed into sustained one-to-one work on power, facilitation, reflexivity and accountable leadership
Open Routes Research began with team mentoring around power and intersectionality and then worked one-to-one with a senior research lead over several months. Sessions used live research and organisational dilemmas as material. We developed a positionality statement, examined the ‘unwarranted power’ attached to university roles, worked on stories of self, considered how to hold and facilitate difficult rooms, and explored what repair and accountability can look like when research relationships go wrong.
What changed
Reflexivity moved from an abstract principle into a continuing part of project leadership and decision-making
The mentoring created a structure for repeatedly asking whose expertise was being valued, how authority was being exercised and how relationships could be handled more carefully. It supported a leadership approach based on curiosity, respect for different forms of knowledge and willingness to examine the research team’s own role in the problems it studies.
Outputs
Team mentoring; sustained one-to-one mentoring; positionality and reflexivity exercises; facilitation and leadership tools