How we work - EDICa

How we work

The EDI Caucus has researchers and investigators based across the UK. We co-design with minoritised groups and conduct research to provide an evidence-base for EDI practices.

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Nothing about us, without us

Co-design at the heart of the EDI Caucus

EDICa has three “Stakeholder Engagement Groups” recruited to work with each of our three workstreams. These are people with lived experience who we bounce ideas off of and gain feedback. People serving on our Stakeholder Engagement Groups who are on low income are given an honorarium.

EDICa also conducts surveys, focus groups and interviews to gain qualitative and quantitative data which feeds into the formulation of “interventions” – a fancy word for changes to the way we do things. These are then implemented and studied over time to see if they are effective.

EDICa seeks to provide an evidence-base for EDI practices.

For detailed information on our research, visit the pages under the Research Projects menu.

EDICa postdoc Chiara Cocco experiencing an anechoic chamber, which deadens most sounds.

We visit places where research happens

It’s important for social scientists working on making research & innovation workspaces more inclusive and accessible to visit and physically experience the wide range of places where this work happens.

Where the UK’s research & innovation happens

Research and innovation takes place in such a variety of places. Some types will come to mind when thinking about R&I – like laboratories and libraries. But R&I also takes place in farm fields, under water, on ships and fishing boats, in space, and deep underground. Boulby Mine Lab is a UKRI facility located 1.1km underground in a mine, where the solar system’s normal radiation is less interfering for certain experiments.
But what is it like to work there? Is it accessible to disabled people?

Check out EDICa’s resources

EDICa hosts a regular blog and seminars, as well as collecting a library of resources of equality, diversity & inclusion practices in research & innovation.

Photo of two people in red coats and woolly hats sit and stand on rock looking at a snow covered landscape and a bay of water with floating ice. The sky is bright blue with whispy clouds and snow covered mountains are in the distance.

Disabled people are missing from Antarctic EDI work: how do we fix it?

Date: 23 May 2024

A guest blog by Alice Oates, a 2023 Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) Fellow.

Interventions Seminar Recording

Date: 22nd May 2024

In May EDICa hosted a panel of funder representatives and researchers to discuss alternative methods of assessing funding applications. Access the recording here.

Team is discussing their work around the table

Peer Review Bias in Funding

Date: 4th April 2024

EDICa publishes a report on Peer Review Bias in Funding. Read some highlights.

Dr Anjali Mazumder

AI and Justice and Human Rights Theme Lead

The Turing Institute

Anjali Mazumder is the Theme Lead on AI and Justice & Human Rights. Her work focuses on empowering government and non-profit organisations by co-designing and developing responsible and inclusive data and AI methods, tools and frameworks for safeguarding people from harm – particularly those most vulnerable, building resilient institutions and systems, and accelerating the opportunity for inclusive, fair and just services, systems, economies, and communities. She is passionate about fostering multi-disciplinary collaborations and multi-sector partnerships to co-create pathways for innovation that improves services, policy, and actions to safeguard human rights and address humanitarian challenges. Her research interests are in developing integrated Bayesian decision support systems to manage uncertainty with complex data structures, value of evidence, causal reasoning in the wild; expert judgement; detecting bias and algorithmic fairness; socio-technical solutions to harnessing multiple disparate sources of data whilst enabling responsible and inclusive data and AI principles and practices; communicating uncertainty and risk; and safeguarding rights and the Rule of Law.

She has over 15 years’ experience tackling fundamental statistical problems of societal importance – human rights, justice, security, the Law, education, public health & safety – working at the interface of research, policy and practice in the UK, the US, and Canada, fostering multi-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations. She was appointed to Canada’s National DNA Databank Advisory Committee (2012-2018) and currently serves on the UK Forensic Science Regulator’s fingerprint interpretation subgroup, and the senior management board of the UK’s Policy and Evidence Centre for Modern Slavery and Human Rights. She has also served the Royal Statistical Society in a variety of ways, most recently appointed to the Statistics & Law Section and the Data Science Section committees. She holds a doctorate in Statistics from the University of Oxford and two masters’ degrees in Measurement and Evaluation, and Statistics from the University of Toronto.

Dr Jenny Douglas

Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion
Faculty of Wellbeing, Education & Language Studies

Dr Jenny Douglas is passionate about the health and wellbeing of black women as evidenced through her research and public engagement. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies and completed her doctoral thesis on cigarette smoking and identity among African-Caribbean young women in contemporary British society. This research brought together two divergent research traditions: medical public health and health promotion approaches with sociological approaches to researching cigarette smoking. This interdisciplinary research approach brings together sociology, public health and women’s studies. Her commitment to comparative approaches finds expression not only in working across disciplinary and national boundaries, but also across theoretical and methodological traditions. Her research is both varied and wide ranging spanning 30 years on issues of race, health, gender and ethnicity. The key theme unifying her research and activism is intersectionality – exploring how ‘race’, class and gender affect particular aspects of African – Caribbean women’s health.

Jenny Douglas established and chairs the Black Women’s Health and Wellbeing Research Network. (www.open.ac.uk/black-womens-health-and-wellbeing) and her ambition is to establish a research institute on the health and wellbeing of black women. She is a contributing author to ‘Inside the Ivory Tower’.

Jenny Douglas is a Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies at the Open University. She has a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of York, an MA in Sociological Research in Health Care from the University of Warwick, an MSc in Environmental Pollution Control from the University of Leeds and a BSc (Hons) in Microbiology and Virology from the University of Warwick. She is module lead of the K311 – ‘Promoting Public Health’, is an honorary member of the Faculty of Public Health and is a director of the UK Public Health Register.

Jenny is a Research Affiliate of the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychology at The George Washington University, Washington D.C., USA.