AccessLab - Healthy Soils
AccessLab is about broadening access to scientific research. The theme this time is ‘Healthy Soils’ - the event is free, and open to all. During the workshops we:
- Look at how scientific research is funded and published, and how you can access it freely.
- Cover basic fact-checking for media stories that relate to science.
- Have time to co-research a science-related topic of your choice one-to-one with a paired researcher. This can be anything you like and it doesn’t necessarily need to be limited to the ‘Healthy Soils’ theme. Your topic or question can relate to your work or your personal life, and we often help participants develop their ideas before the workshop takes place.
By the end you’ll have found answers to the question you came with, but also have the skills to find and use scientific research for your work/life after the event. Past participants have used AccessLabs to enact policy change (e.g. a councillor who looked into carbon dioxide emissions from idling coaches and achieved a ban), gather evidence for a court case (e.g. a Government agency official who looked into the impact of net sizes on fisheries catches), research content for books and films (e.g. an illustrator who looked into the menstrual cycle for a children's book), and do their jobs more sustainably (e.g. a professional gardener who looked into whether harvesting seaweed as a fertiliser was environmentally problematic).
The event is on 25 January 2025, 10am-4pm, at Jubilee Warehouse in Penryn. We’ll provide a full free lunch (we’re very happy to cater for any and all dietary requirements). For anyone who can’t come because of care responsibilities for example, we might be able to provide some support to help cover these costs.
There is a short training session for the researchers on 22 January 2025, 3-5pm, in the same place.
The spaces are limited as we keep these workshops small and relaxed (max 8 participants and 8 researchers), so if you’d like us to book a space for you , or answer any of your questions about it, then send us an email!
The event is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), run by Then Try This which is a non-profit organisation based in Penryn, and is a collaboration with Dr. Elze Hesse who’s a soil microbiology researcher at the University of Exeter.
"It’s brilliant… it’s a long time since I was part of a workshop that gave me so much in just one day. I feel I have fundamentally shifted the bounds of possibility."—Policy sector participant, Plymouth 2018.