Barbara Doran, University of Technology Sydney; Ann Dadich, Western Sydney University; Chloe Watfern, UNSW; Katherine M Boydell, UNSW, and Stephanie Habak, UNSW

A new project that spotlights the strain from COVID-19 on our health systems and the people who work in them has invited health-care leaders and artists to create artworks that illuminate what it has been like leading, working and living through the pandemic.

The culmination of this collaboration is Topsy Turvy, an interactive digital exhibition initiated by the Knowledge Translation Strategic Platform of Maridulu Budyari Gumal SPHERE (Sydney Partnership for Health Education Research and Enterprise) whose purpose is to change the future of health care.

Topsy Turvy is a random image generator that makes combinations from a bank of drawings and text inspired by experiences of COVID-19. Users can opt to keep, delete and resize until they feel they have an image that resonates.

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Our blog has been running since 2015 and had many people pitching in to keep it a blog for the Society by the Society. Our latest blog co-editors have just been announced at the latest ISCHP conference. As it happens, all three are kiwis studying health psychology at Massey University. You can read more about them in this post.

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By Abel Polese, June 2021

Abel’s post discusses the implications of Plan S, which requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state funding in member countries to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all (thanks, Wikipedia).

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Anthony Idowu Ajayi, African Population and Health Research Center; Boniface Ushie, African Population and Health Research Center, and Caroline Kabiru, African Population and Health Research Center

There has been tremendous growth in the number of studies on sexual and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa in the past two decades. Notably, there has been an increase in research documenting what works in improving adolescents’ health and wellbeing.

However, the use of findings from these studies to inform the development of policies is low. For example, research shows that educating young people about their sexuality and giving them access to contraceptive methods has lifelong benefits. But few sub-Saharan African countries have enacted laws or policies that follow through on the evidence.

As a result of this inaction, adolescents continue to experience early unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and other poor health outcomes.

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By Tracy Morison, March 2021

I no longer have any illusions of myself as a creative writer. I was disabused of this notion very early in my academic life after receiving feedback on a chapter I wrote for an interdisciplinary book. The editor was an English professor and published poet. After providing kind feedback on two drafts in which he politely encouraged me to be more expressive, he announced flatly that my writing style was ‘very soc sci’. He was not wrong. Our training as social scientists, and especially psychologists I think, rewards clarity, conciseness, and coherence (the social scientist’s holy trinity) but doesn’t foster creative expression. Yet, there are those rare (infuriating) scholars whose prose is pleasurable, provocative, and effective. It is possible, apparently!

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By Kathryn McGuigan, Kristi Urry, Andrea LaMarre, & Gareth Treharne, September 2020

In our first ISCHP blog post, we reflected on our contributions to the Illness Snapshots Symposium at the ISCHP conference 2019 and what this provoked for us in relation to how and why we do our research. At the end of the blog we raised several questions as to how, when, why, and to what extent researchers can or should reflect on their own and others’ work as people doing (critical) research. In this follow-up post, we continue this conversation with co-presenters from the Snapshots symposium: Andrea LaMarre and Gareth Treharne. Having reflected on their own experiences in response to the questions we raised in our first post, we include their (abridged) reflections in this piece, braiding these with our own ongoing reflexive considerations.  Once again, we invite readers to join this conversation by engaging with colleagues and students, with us, and with the wider ISCHP community.

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