Facilitator

Overview

I find joy in facilitation of workshops and ideation sessions. In particular, those which bring together diverse groups to solve complex problems (e.g., interdisciplinary researchers, or those from different cultures). I have facilitated several one off workshops, using a range of dynamic techniques to get people working together to share and develop ideas.

Here I outline some of the more ambitious projects I've run to bring together groups to achieve tangible results.

Bringing together African & European Research Communities with an Inclusive Astronomy Conference

Conference participant photograph. Around 90 people looking up at a camera taken from a balcony

In July 2024, I co-chaired with Leah Morabito (Durham University) a workshop to bring together researchers from African and European communities. A report can be found here: https://zenodo.org/records/14179194

Significant planning went into creating an inclusive and supportive process, to give equity of access to a scientifically vibrant international workshop, for those who are historically underprivileged and excluded. 43% of the participants were of African origin or affiliation. We believe the processes and lessons learnt will be useful and interesting to a wide range of communities. Therefore we've written up the report of what we did, including a participant evaluation, and with recommendations for other communities with similar objectives. Our conference happened to be about supermassive black holes and lots of exciting science resulted from it, including new collaborations! Many of the conference contributions can also be found on the Zenodo community.

Audible Universe Workshops

In 2021 and 2022, myself and Anita Zanella ran two interdisciplinary workshops called "Audible Universe" as the primary organisers. The first of these was run online, the second in person. It brought together a diverse group of people from the fields of astronomy, education, sound design, accessibility and psycho-acoustics. The shared goal was to investigate how data sonification is applied in astronomy. The workshops explored what had been done already, and how to bring in expertise across the different fields for more effective sonification design and evaluation moving forward. It was rewarding but challenging to organise and facilitate. It required well structured planning before, during, and after the workshops to make sure everyone was able to communicate effectively and work towards shared goals. A huge amount of effort went into the facilitation.

Several articles were published as a result of the workshops, including:

An overview of the online workshop: Harrison et al., Nature Astronomy, 6, 22 (2022)
Suggestions from the sound design and psyco-accoustics experts for the astronomers: Misdariis et al., Nature Astronomy, 6, 1249 (2022)
An overview of how the workshops were facilitated: Misdariis et al. ICAD p257(2023), .

Google Sites

Report abuse