Why hold a workshop on lived experience and historical research?
While the social sciences have increasingly adopted lived experience expertise as a key aspect of many research projects, this is still relatively rare within historical research. Historians are now familiar with both public engagement and the wider concept of research impact, but the inclusion of lived experience within research is still uncommon, despite the value that it could bring to many projects.
Lived experience advisors are individuals who self-identify as having lived experience relevant to a particular research topic – such as mental health, racialisation, or disability discrimination. Lived experience expertise exists within academia under a number of different names, including Lived Experience Advisory Boards, Youth Advisory Groups, and Co-Production Groups, Service User Research and Survivor Research. Lived experience experts use their personal knowledge and expertise to inform the strategic direction, governance, design and delivery of the research. Lived experience in research is sometimes summarised with the phrase ‘nothing about us, without us’.
The lead organisers, Dr Gabriel Lawson and Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh, both historians of medicine and psychiatry now working in an interdisciplinary research centre alongside social scientists, sought to hold an exploratory workshop to investigate the potential use of lived experience involvement within historical research. The RHS kindly agreed to provide funding via a workshop grant, and the workshop was held in July 2025, with involvement from scholars from King’s College London, SOAS, Royal Holloway, Black Cultural Archives and Birkbeck. Members of the Lived Experience Advisory Board at the ESRC Centre for Society & Mental Health also helped us frame the questions being asked and participated on the day.
The Workshop
Over the course of a day in July 2025, we hosted a group of historians and lived experience experts at the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London to collectively consider what lived experience involvement could look like within historical research. We began the day by delivering an overview of the concepts and ethics of lived experience involvement, followed by Dr Ruth Beecher presenting her approach and learnings from her Wellcome Trust-funded Recovery Histories project, and our lived experience colleagues Dr Cas Lovelock and Raza Griffiths sharing their expertise on what makes good involvement. After lunch, we held a facilitated discussion where the group shared their experiences with lived experience involvement, considered challenges and hesitations, proposed shared principles and values, and developed emerging themes for lived experience involvement in historical research.
As a group, we had diverse experiences with varying degrees of involvement from the more consultative role of advisory boards up through full partnership and co-production projects. Some of us explicitly identified as having experience facilitating or doing lived experience involvement, while others felt they had engaged in partnership work that although could be defined as lived experience involvement, wouldn’t have described it in that way. This is unsurprising given that the term ‘lived experience involvement’ is only newly gaining visibility and traction within history and other humanities disciplines, who are more likely to have pursued other kinds of public engagement activities. We considered as a group how our involvement practices might differ from those in other disciplines, health research for instance, and even where there are similarities, whether disciplinary norms and needs warranted the development of a separate and specific set of definitions and code of practice for lived experience involvement in historical research. Our discussions were rich and ranging, bringing in perspectives from oral history, anthropology and ethnography, museum studies, health research, survivor research and public engagement. The outcome from the day was the beginning stages of articulating a history-specific understanding of lived experience involvement and the role in can play in creating rigorous, representative and socially just historical research. Below we share some of the emerging themes that arose from our conversations.
What Makes ‘Good’ Involvement?
Good lived experience involvement begins with clear principles: respect, reciprocity, and shared ownership of knowledge. It recognises that involvement must be purpose-driven rather than tokenistic. Communities should understand why they are being invited to participate and how their contributions will shape the research. Ideally, community members will be invited to participate as co-researchers able to shape all stages of a research project. Where this is not possible or appropriate, community members might be brought onto an advisory board (similar to an impact advisory board on other projects) which meets at agreed intervals to oversee the project and provide feedback.
Meaningful involvement requires more than inclusion; it calls for a rethinking of the principles, purposes, and processes that underpin historical research. This means sharing power with those whose experiences we seek to understand, and valuing them as co-creators, not passive subjects. Attention must be given to how relationships are built, how decisions are made, and how authority is distributed within the research process. Central to this is humility: a willingness to listen, to learn, and to be challenged.
At a fundamental level, good involvement should seek to make a difference: not only within the academy, but in the lives of those who participate and the communities they represent. This approach must be grounded in a commitment to social justice. Historians must ask how we can listen meaningfully to communities who have been devalued or excluded from historical narratives, and how our work might contribute to redressing those silences.
An essential aspect of this commitment is fair recognition of people’s time and expertise. Payment is a tangible way of valuing lived experience as a form of knowledge equal in importance to academic labour. Yet beyond financial recognition, genuine involvement also means amplifying voices in spaces where they have historically been marginalised. This is, by its nature, a political act, and researchers should be transparent about that with the communities they engage.
Rethinking Our Approach
Lived experience involvement in historical research is not simply a methodological choice, it requires a reframing of research into a two-way relationship between researcher and subject. It challenges dominant narratives and ideas about the production of knowledge, and asks us to consider who has traditionally held authority in terms of telling the past.
Engaging in this work often means confronting uncomfortable truths. It requires navigating the subtle and systemic ways certain voices have been marginalised, and maintaining awareness of the interplay between the personal and the institutional. Without care, researchers risk reproducing the very hierarchies they aim to disrupt.
Equally important is the need to recognise and resist epistemic and testimonial injustice – situations where people’s knowledge is dismissed because of who they are, or where their experiences are deemed less credible or relevant. Addressing these injustices is not only an ethical obligation but also an intellectual one, central to research that seeks to be genuinely inclusive.
A recurring theme throughout the workshop was the importance of asking uncomfortable but necessary questions: Where is the money? Where is the power? These questions expose the structural forces that shape participation and remind us that involvement is often constrained by funding priorities and institutional hierarchies. While universities encourage research-related activities which can be framed as ‘impact’, often institutional bureaucracies are not set up to support the involvement of those with lived experience of issues within research.
The same questions about power and resources that shape institutions also play out within research teams themselves. Efforts to embed lived experience are not only challenged by external structures but also by the everyday dynamics of collaboration: how roles are defined, whose expertise is valued, and how decisions are made. Within teams which include academic researchers and individuals with lived experience, relationships can be complex and uneven. There may be talk of shared knowledge or collaborative practice, but in reality, discrepancies in training, skillsets, and access to resources can reinforce divisions. Without conscious effort, involvement risks becoming symbolic rather than substantive.
The Language of Involvement
When seeking to build lived experience into a project, clear definitions are essential. What do we mean by ‘involvement’? Who gets to decide what counts? Communication and transparency are not just logistical matters: they carry emotional and relational weight. The labour involved in bridging different positionalities (academic, activist, community-based) is often invisible and undervalued by the structures of academia.
Lived experience involvement is not a novelty; in many cases, it’s something that already happens organically within research. But formal structures often fail to recognise or fund this work adequately. The tension between grassroots activity and institutional expectations creates friction, and frequently, exclusion.
There is no singular or universally accepted definition of what constitutes meaningful lived experience involvement, and this plurality should be acknowledged. Different research contexts and communities will develop their own understandings over time. However, what remains problematic is the institutional denial of involvement, where lived experience is nominally acknowledged but substantively excluded. Such practices risk undermining the very principles of co-production and inclusivity that are often professed at the surface level.
It is essential to critically challenge the notion of a ‘level playing field’ within research environments. Individuals and communities do not engage with historical research from equal positions of power, knowledge, or access. To ignore these asymmetries is to overlook the structural barriers that shape participation. A meaningful approach to involvement must therefore recognise and respond to these inequalities through sustained reflection, transparent practices, and a commitment to structural change.
Conclusion
The authors hope that historians will seek to involve communities with their research wherever possible, not because such activities are desired by funders and the REF, but because doing so can provide new perspectives and new opportunities for impact. Models exist, from the social sciences and elsewhere, which can facilitate ethical and impactful lived experience involvement. Often this is not easy – a lack of resources, a lack of training, and a lack of institutional support can make this difficult – but when done properly lived experience involvement can produce innovative and engaging research which connects to contemporary communities.
A longer piece is now in development for the Transactions of the RHS ‘Common Room’, exploring some of these themes in more depth. We have also continued these conversations in various fora including the Mental Health Histories Summer School at the University of Reading (co-organised by Dr Sookdeosingh) in the hopes of continuing to build awareness of the value of lived experience involvement as an historical methodology. Ultimately, we hope that through working together as historians we can create a discipline-specific model of lived experience involvement that reflects our disciplinary strengths and values.
About the authors
Dr Gabriel Lawson is a Research Associate at the Policy Institute, King’s College London. He primarily works on issues related to mental health, alongside our colleagues at the Centre for Society and Mental Health.
Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh is a Research Associate and Lived Experience Advisory Board (LEAB) Coordinator at the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King’s College London.
Further Resources
IoPPN Research Culture Insights Blog: Lived Experience Advisory Board, Dr Rhea Sookdeosingh
4Pi Involvement Standards, National Survivor User Network
LSE Blog, What social scientists talk about when they talk about ‘Lived Experience’
NIHR, Putting lived experience at the heart of research
About RHS Workshop Grants
Workshop Grants enable historians to come together to pursue projects of shared interest. Projects are broadly defined and may focus not only on academic research but also a wider range of activities. Grants offer £1,000 for hosting a day event. Workshops support a wider range of group activities relating to history.
These may include: discussion of an existing research topic or project; beginning and testing a research idea, leading to a future project; piloting work relating to the teaching, research or communication of history; planning and writing a grant application; and undertaking networking and building of academic communities.
The call for the latest round of RHS Workshop Grants is now open with a closing date of 23 January 2026.
