LET'S ROAM!Rural communities are already seeing the impact of climate change around the world. This includes many rural communities in Ireland, whose daily lives are affected. Their lived experiences mean they have important expertise that we should listen to. ROAM is a small research project from the University of Galway that seeks to do exactly this. Between July - September 2023, we aim to listen and learn through focus groups and workshops. The focus groups and workshops will both run for 2 hours and will be in a local venue for participants. For the focus groups, we will share questions and invite discussion about climate. For the workshops, participants will test out experiments for citizen science projects. The experiments selected will come from the ideas shared in the focus groups. We will then discuss together which experiments would work best. Participants are welcome to join both a focus group and a workshop, or just one of them. We are applying for funding to develop and run the final citizen science experiment in 2024. We hope to share the results in a paper and in a short video. Good science communication relies on trust, so we want to share our motivations for this work. We want to work with rural communities for three key reasons: |
One: We want to platform their views and voices. We worry that we only hear the loudest or best connected voices in the media.
Two: We want to ensure we include their perspectives in our future work. We want to work with these communities in a collaborative way.
Three: We want to identify potentially relevant citizen science projects to empower them. Rural communities have important questions about climate change that we should explore.