SSAP Professorial Lecture: Professor Debbie Horsfall

How do we enable people to speak the unspoken and the difficult, to tell us about what really matters to them. How do we tell the stories entrusted to us and avoid smoothing out the visceral and emotional along the researcher's way? How do we capture the space of the possible rather than the space of the usual and enlarge conversations for change in policy and practice? And what does it take to listen? The space of the possible is a vulnerable space, a difficult space to inhabit. However vulnerability can enable you to get straight to the heart of the matter, to be compassionately and intellectually engaged with another's lived experience.