I recently read a really compelling blog by Stacey Smith. It opens with the question; “What does it take to create spaces that are safe enough for those with lived experience to lead research into the very issues that caused them harm?” Smith has been carrying out a Mental Health Research for All fellowship with NIHR ARC North Thames which she describes as sitting at the intersection of lived experience, ethics, and innovation.
It has really got me thinking about the care and attention necessary to support ‘Lived experience researchers’. Smith frames this as being about creating ‘safe enough’ spaces- I like this framing. How we support researchers to navigate being triggered, negotiating boundaries, embodied memories, and the right to withdraw or retreat. Stacey focuses on researcher safety as relational and negotiated. She articulates the importance of creating ‘safe enough’ spaces rooted in feminist ethics of care, which prioritise ‘relational accountability’.
I have seen different academic initiatives which highlight the need to explore funding for counselling support for researchers vulnerable to traumatisation, yet I wonder if outsourcing this to a paid service is just offloading the issue. Can we really out-source care without the necessary work of creating care-full spaces?
This passage really spoke to me:
‘Engaging with narratives of harm or injustice, is not a neutral act. For those of us whose histories echo the stories we study, immersion can reopen wounds, blur boundaries, and evoke emotional responses that conventional research ethics rarely anticipate. Leading as someone with lived experience is, of course, meaningful. But it demands emotional labour that is invisible in most methodological frameworks, and it exposes us to risks that are seldom acknowledged in institutional discourse.’ (Smith, 2026)
Yet thinking on this I note the power of the ‘lived experience’ label here. Many of us are not badged as ‘Lived experience researchers’, but are rather, ‘Researchers with lived experience’ and in this framing our professional status renders attention to these conditions of care absent.
In this piece by Sara Aroussi this label is reframed as, ‘survivor/researcher’. Aroussi highlights the ways in which being a survivor/researcher can be transformative, offering people the chance for vicarious justice and reclaiming voice. Yet importantly she also highlights ‘rage’. Rage at the violation of self and others, rage at the ongoing injustices. I have also started to feel rage at the academy, for the ways in which survivor knowledge is devoured for institutional output metrics yet without care for the creators. Smith highlights the way in which lived experience research is being celebrated, but yet, ‘inclusion does not dissolve power, it simply reshapes it’. She notes that power dynamics in teams can mirror the harm done in abusive scenarios.
It is an open secret that academia is a prestige economy, rife with bullying, and often exploitative. It is not uncommon to see senior academics exploiting junior researchers and appropriating their work. It leaves wounds.
I write often about feminist praxis in research ethics, yet in reality it is often only practiced with research participants not peers. It’s particularly galling to see this in ‘feminist’ academia.
Thinking this through I find myself reaching to my bookshelf for Sara Ahmed’s book, Living a Feminist Life (2017). In it she weaves personal experience with feminist theory, and was famously written after she quit academia in protest about her university’s (Goldsmith’s) failure to redress sexual harassment and assault. Many of us wonder whether feminist praxis is somehow incompatible with the institutional hunger games which seem to barely leave space for humanity never mind care. Reading this book I wonder what REF score it would have received if Ahmed had not left academia. The value of her insights would have surely been overlooked in these metrics, but yet as feminist survivor/researchers we need such words. Solidarity building and hopeful words. Participating in a hyper-competitive academic field increasingly rooted in capitalist principles is surely the antithesis of feminist praxis.
We need to be working to create ‘safe enough’ spaces for all our researchers, not just those we are categorising as ‘LE’. It should be a minimum condition for all violence work as it is well known that survivors of abuse are often drawn to the violence prevention space. I often think about how much has been lost in the drive to professionalise the field and objectify knowledge and practice.
I really welcome reflections from researchers who are positioned in such a way as to be explicit about their lived experience and the way researching impacts them. It is a bravery that some of us can less afford.
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