Faculty webinar - Delivering innovation in social care: The DISC research study - investigating co-produced support for unpaid carers by social enterprise organisations with Dr Maria Cheshire-Allen

This webinar draws on Dr Cheshire-Allen's experiences as a qualitative social gerontologist working alongside community groups and unpaid carers in social care research. Their research focuses on unpaid care in later life, the ethics of care and caring communities, with particular attention to social justice in community-based research with unpaid carers.  

Drawing from examples from their Health and Care Research Wales Advanced Fellowship, Maria will share what they've learned about co-designing projects with unpaid carers, the tensions, the surprises and the times things didn't go as planned. They will reflect on the complexities of partnership work, the moments where power feels unbalanced, where trust needs building and where good intentions don't always translate into genuine collaboration.  

Finally, Maria will discuss how their thinking has evolved around meaningful partnerships in shaping research questions, gathering data and making findings accessible and useful.

This is an exploration of their ongoing journey as a researcher in trying to ensure that research genuinely serves the people it aims to benefit, while grappling with the inherent complexities and contradictions of doing so. 

Speaker

Maria is a Social Care Fellowship award holder. Her research interests include unpaid care, ageing, care inequalities and social care markets, with a particular focus on the role of community and social enterprise organisations in the social care sector. Her mixed methods Fellowship study aims to explore the contribution of social enterprise organisations in supporting unpaid carers.  

She has established and Chairs the Care Research Interest Group in Wales (CRIG) and is a member of the Welsh Government’s Cross-Party Group on Ageing and Older People, the British Society of Gerontology and the European Social Policy Network on Ageing.  

Prior to her Fellowship award, Maria was a Co-Investigator for the Health and Care Research Wales funded COSMO study (COVID-19 Impact on the Support and Management of COVID-19 on Older People in Wales) at Swansea Centre for Health Economics (SCHE) and worked as a Research Officer at the Centre for Ageing and Dementia (CADR). 

Submit your question for Maria to answer during the webinar.