Research Advisory Committee meet to take vegan research forward

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» Research Advisory Committee meet to take vegan research forward

The Vegan Society's Research Advisory Committee recently met to discuss how to contribute effectively to The Vegan Society's research strategy and support new vegan research.

On 22nd June, the newly-reformed Research Advisory Committee (RAC) met at Sheffield University for an exciting and fruitful day of knowledge-exchange. The seminar was organised and hosted by The Vegan Society’s Research Officer, Dr Lorna Marques-Brocksopp and Chair of the RAC, Dr Richard Twine, who is the Co-Director of the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University. The event proved to be a thought-provoking, stimulating day of presentations, debate and discussions about how to take forward the role of research within The Vegan Society.

The morning session saw introductions from Richard and Lorna, providing updates from The Vegan Society and outlining plans for going forward over the next 12 months. This followed by a series of presentations from RAC members about their specific research areas, interests and current projects (presentations will be made available in due course). 

The afternoon session continued with further presentations from members, and followed with a presentation by Lorna about The Vegan Society’s new research strategy, which has been developed over the last six months and is linked directly to our overall strategic plan. Lorna explained the need for a research strategy to help direct future research towards clearly identifiable strategic goals and key performance indicators. Three Research Portfolios have been created: 'Health and Wellbeing'; 'Society and Culture' and 'Environment and Sustainability'.

Much of the research by members of the RAC can be categorised as falling either within or between these broad portfolios and members are providing further advice about their development and elaboration. Each Portfolio will develop projects in line with the research strategy and in doing so provide timely evidence for our ongoing campaigns, policy work and providing opportunities for cross-departmental working, such as the recent How Many Vegans project. The development of projects within each of the three Portfolios will be supported by the members of the RAC. Plans are already under way to begin new research projects in collaboration with RAC members to further our Hospital Catering for All campaign. This has been made possible by your help over the last 12 months by your response to our campaign to date. On page 20 of the Autumn 2015 edition of The Vegan we asked you to contact us to take part in a research project about the experiences of vegan catering in hospitals. Many of you contacted Lorna and took part in this project, which resulted in a wealth of qualitative data to form case studies for the campaign. This data will now form part of a new project to be developed with members of the RAC as part of the 'Health and Wellbeing' Portfolio. Other projects include providing new evidence to update our Grow Green report which will form part of the 'Environment and Sustainability' Portfolio. 

The afternoon ended with an interesting and enthusiastic roundtable discussion of how the RAC could support The Vegan Society over the coming 12 months and beyond. Collaboration with member’s respective institutions and research centres was discussed, as was the possible formation of a Postgraduate Special Interest Group (SIG) to bring together postgraduate students who are conducting research into the issues across the vegan agenda. This would be beneficial for both postgraduate students and universities by providing a link between theory and professional practice and would help The Vegan Society by providing much-needed data and specific areas of expertise to help further the research strategy. During the roundtable discussion an idea was posited about the RAC and The Vegan Society holding a postgraduate forum event in Spring 2017 to bring together interested postgraduate students.

If you are a postgraduate student whose research thesis is connected to the issues in our strategic plan and would like to be placed on the mailing list for this event next spring, please get in touch with an outline of your research and how you think it may link with our strategic objectives here at The Vegan Society.

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