In this episode, Professor Goodman Sibeko and Dr David Patton examine how knowledge is created, valued, and used within addiction science. Drawing on his experience as a researcher and advocate for participatory approaches, David challenges traditional assumptions about who gets to produce evidence and whose voices are recognised as experts.

The conversation explores the historical foundations of scientific knowledge, the limitations of relying on a single way of understanding complex human experiences, and the consequences of excluding lived experience from research and policy discussions. David reflects on the growing interest in co-production, the difference between genuine participation and tokenism, and why sharing power is central to creating more inclusive knowledge.

Through practical examples from his own work, he discusses how lived experience can strengthen research, challenge established narratives, and open new ways of understanding addiction, recovery, and social change.

Featured Voices

Host – A/Prof. Goodman Sibeko

ISSUP Global Scientific Advisor.

Head of Addiction Psychiatry, University of Cape Town.

LinkedIn: goodmansibeko

Twitter/X: @profgsibeko

Guest – Dr David Patton

Dr David Patton is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of Derby whose work focuses on lived experience, participatory research, recovery, and social justice. He leads international initiatives that amplify lived experience voices, including Recovery Atlas and New Central Media, and has over 25 years of experience in higher education.

Time Stamps

[00:00] – Introduction

[00:41] – What Do We Mean by Evidence?

[06:02] – Challenging Traditional Ways of Knowing

[10:23] – Lived Experience as a Form of Knowledge

[16:20] – Beyond Tokenism: The Reality of Co-Production

[18:48] – When Voices Are Excluded

[23:18] – Building Capacity and Leadership

[28:21] – More Than Anecdotes

[33:50] – Relationships, Trust, and the Future of Knowledge Production

[35:33] – Closing Reflections

About the ISSUP Exchange

The ISSUP Exchange podcast series explores the evolution of responses to the challenges of substance use—from research and training to ethics, quality standards and evidence-based practice. We connect the dots so you can see the big picture.

Explore more episodes and join the ISSUP podcast community here>>>

About ISSUP

ISSUP is a global network that unites, connects, and shares knowledge across the substance use prevention, treatment, and recovery support workforce. Our mission is to make our members’ work as effective as possible—by providing access to training, resources, and a vibrant professional community.

Welcome back to this special ISSUP podcast series titled Democratizing Evidence, looking at Lived Experience and the Future of Addiction Science with my friend David Patton. In this second episode, we're going to explore the concept of democratizing the evidence base. We'll unpack how knowledge is traditionally constructed in addiction science and then consider how lived experience can perhaps challenge and maybe even complement, and importantly, how it can strengthen these approaches. David, welcome back.

Thank you for surviving and sticking with us. and we're just thrilled to have you back.

It's really great to be with you Goodman.

Awesome. Now, David, when we talk about evidence in addiction science, what do we generally mean? What are we talking about?

Yeah, evidence. I really love this term and you hear it bounded around all the time. And oftentimes it's bounded around by those people who feel insecure or who trying to dominate the narrative. It's a power word. It's in this power play. So, you need often go to conferences and people will pepper in these phrases. As we can see, the knowledge base is saying, the hard data is showing us and then they'll quote a statistic.

And it's all predicated upon and you've got to bear with me Goodman, okay, I'm a social scientist, but if I could just take us back. So, positivism, know, we've got to understand the roots of it. Where did it come from? Where does the science in this evidence base that we, everyone feels like they're failing at or, you know, organizations are always trying to kind of marry up to this standard to show the impact of their work and whether their work is effective. But we've got to look back and go, okay, actually, this is one form of knowledge production and it's in an extricably linked to coloniality. Now, big word, don't disappear for a moment, but we've got to understand that the white European male, when it was kind of wiping out, entire geographic regions historically, not only did it own geographic countries and regions, but it also then redefined how people were living and it redefined how knowledge can be produced. And so, it said things like your tribal and cultural forms of knowing, your intuition, your rituals, all of those are invalid. And from here on in, this is the only form of knowledge, which is valid, which is supreme. And so, we saw the rise of scientific knowledge in quotation marks.

And so, you know, if you've not had time to look at this sort of stuff, it's like features such around objectivity and that knowledge is supposed to be neutral and detached. It's things around empiricism. So that we're supposed to observe and measure phenomenon. If you can't measure it, it is not real. And we've got to look at cause and effect relationships or causality. Does this input or variable affect the other one? And we've also got to be generalizable. So, we've got to apply the findings and knowledge across all population and people groups. And also, there's something called like replicability. Can the knowledge in the study be reproduced? If I was to do this study again, will I get the same findings? And the other big one is around being theory driven. So new knowledge has got to be built upon old knowledge. And so, you've got to link back to what other published works have said. And then another key feature is reductivism. So, there it's kind of you're taking people, life, complex phenomenon, yeah? And because it's looking at cause and effect, can't acknowledge complexity. So, it's got to compartmentalize and break people and issues into separate components in order to analyse them in that fragment. And then finally, probably a final feature of it is around kind of value free inquiry. So, we've got to be free from personal and moral and kind of, you know, political influences in the work that we do. Now, all of that sounds really great on paper, doesn't it, Goodman? Yeah, you wouldn't disagree with any of that. But I think, unfortunately, what it leads to, you know, objectivity alone leads to these standardized assessments and interventions. So, you look at the treatment and recovery world, people have been told you've got to be objective in the work that you do. So, create a standardized risk assessment. So, everyone's risk assessing all of their clients, which introduces a hierarchy and makes people feel like they're broken and that they're wrong. The whole thing around empiricism has led to this obsession with quantifiable and numerical forms of knowledge and statistics.

Now, who can even remember a statistic from the last PowerPoint you sat through? We don't. And we think that if we take what somebody has said to us, so if I ask you a qualitative question, you give me a verbal answer, I then codify that into a zero or a one, right into my kind of Excel or SPSS sheet. And then I can do a certain test with that. And so, then I can say 75 % of people and making this up. So, 5 % of people Yeah, just to be very clear, who eat bacon 75 times a week, develops cancer. Yeah. So, these statistics then, a really good headline grabbing, they like to shout. Yeah, but actually experience and lived experience resonates. doesn't shout and generalization, another huge one. What it's done is promoted this one size fits all approach, programs and interventions that fit this one type of person. Even if you've been in a romantic relationship or a friendship, no two people are alike, yet we're obsessed with this generalizable intervention.

Then we wonder why people of difference, whether that's in terms of ethnicity, disability, sexuality, religious and cultural beliefs aren't accessing support. It's because there's this midpoint, this set point that all of the programs based upon the scientific knowledge and the best practice have been based upon. I mean, it's just brilliant, isn't it?

So, I think I think David w the question that comes to mind for me is are you saying that there's no place for this traditional definition of evidence? Or are you saying we accept that these are the traditional you know, confines of how evidence is understood, but we need to consider other options, and we need to marry it with other what are you saying?

Yeah, so I'm not anti-science. Yeah, I think what I stand against and, you know, in the previous episode, I liken myself to Morpheus, kind of saying that the system and the science is not the enemy, but the illusions that they create are. And I think if we come to the space saying that this knowledge form of production that we've been told is the only way to create knowledge, that is untrue.

There are many diverse ways to create knowledge. There are many diverse forms of knowledge. We need to collapse the hierarchy of knowledge. And I think I'm against the monopolization of it. And I think if we're thinking about, you know, the argument is there's gotta be a gatekeeper, whether that's principles or people, institutions, know, that having gatekeepers doesn't guarantee quality assurance.

What is guaranteeing is elitism and the dominance of the narrative. That's what that is ensuring. And so, for me, I'm absolutely pro-science, but we've got to come to it from a space of humility, of criticality. The science keeps changing. And we don't say that you never hear the science has failed, but the science of today is different from the science of yesterday.

And we accept, because it's science, that the science has moved on, that we've got better methods, better questions, so on and so forth. But then we don't allow that same sense of humility for other forms of knowledge production or other types of people groups who've been excluded traditionally from knowledge production. So why is it, whether it's in the publishing industry, the journal industry, who gets to lead the research projects. It's always people with a PhDs, with a command of English, so on and so forth, come from certain privileged backgrounds or inhabit them currently. And so, you get the story that's dominated by one kind of person telling one kind of story. Like it's even in popular culture with the movies that we watch in the West, it's always the hero's journey, you know, so you get the main character who has a wound or some obstacle and challenge, but they've got a destiny where they don't believe in themselves and there's someone who comes along to help and support them. They go through the challenge and have the war, the battle, whatever the issue may be, and come out the other end and they always win. These Western narratives, and they don't exist in other forms of the world, but they've come to dominate globally through coloniality.

The Disney fantasy narrative. I think, you know, you know, that we'll delve in a little bit more into what it means to start integrating knowledge systems and to start integrating ideas about how knowledge is generated and how it's shared. I think my first question before we get there is who's traditionally understood or seen to be the producers of this valid knowledge? I think we've alluded to it already when we spoke about promotion and about academia.

But just in, you know, succinctly, who would who's traditionally seen as producers of knowledge?

Yes, it's always the people in positions of power. So, it's the people with the qualifications, the master's degrees, the PhDs, the professional, you know, clinical psychologists, whatever it may be, people with the titles. And so those people are let through the doors to lead the research knowledge production projects, or they get the book contracts through the publishers. So, it's never your ordinary everyday person.

And also, the other fascinating thing around academia as well is that there can only be one star of the show. And that's the project lead. And again, you in my own practice, for me, it's always a community. come with a community, as a community, never as an individual. And so, you know, it's not about how great I am and what I've done, but what we have done as a collective.

And that's a strong challenge, I think, to the knowledge production industry to move away from this notion. And for me, that links to capitalism, performing and productive individual who's typically the extrovert, charismatic male, if I might add. Yeah, it promotes this kind of notion that there can be one leader.

And so, David, how do these researchers and these field experts and these PhDs, as we point out, you know, when they say you when you point four fingers point back at you, right? So how do how do these folks view lived experience? Do they or do we see a place for it in general? Do we respect it? Do we invite it? What what's what what are we doing?

Yeah, well, so I started off back in the late 90s when I started doing my PhD. And at that point, know, notions of lived experience, especially in the UK, weren't really heard of. Of course, they've always existed in much more of the liberatory and emancipatory forms of knowledge production globally, especially in the global south, but in the global north, through the influence of dominance of positivism, those certainly were not the case. Increasingly over the decades, we've moved to a place where people would then consult with people from marginalized vulnerable backgrounds. And now the buzzword is co-production and lived experience is now the latest buzzword is certainly in the UK around kind of incorporating people with lived experience. And we know that practice is still very patchy as to whether A, it occurs at all, but two, secondly, where it does occur, what we're seeing is oftentimes it's more tokenism and tick box so that we can say that yes, we did co-produce with lived experience, but what it means is that they're invited to X number of meetings and they got to say some words during those meetings.

But co-production is not about just including people, it's about giving them power and sharing the power and letting go of the reins, if you like, of the project, of the narrative. And of course, traditionally, the leaders of the projects don't like to do that. So that's why there's always that constant tussle. But I do think we're starting to see some progress. I've just submitted a journal article recently, which you could not submit to that special edition unless it had been co-written with People with Lived Experience and the research had been also kind of co-produced together. And that's the huge kind of stride forward, dare we say radical. It's a shame that we have to apply such phrases to such what I would consider basic approaches. I've published with People with Lived Experience all of the work that I've done, it's co-produced with Lived Experience.

New Central Media, which is the publishing platform that I lead. All of the books are written by people with lived experience. So, we've done four different books, and we've created 50 authors with lived experience. They're paid; they're now published in print. Because really the reason for that was that it struck me when I got my last promotion to associate professor. As someone who's not used drugs, someone who's invited kind of globally to speak on drug issues, having never used one, never been addicted to one. Everything I've learned is by listening to people who've used drugs, who are addicted to drugs, people who've recovered from drugs and are now through the other side, wherever people are on that journey. And so I then take the learnings from those communities, typically in the past would write them up and I get the credit. Dave, that journal article was amazing.

And so, I vowed at that point that I wouldn't just promote the narrative of stigma, isn't it awful? Isn't it awful what happens to these people, these types of people? So I create new central media to kind of address that, to give a tangible platform of knowledge production whereby people with the true knowledge, in my view, can become the authors and producers of knowledge, can control the narrative, have a platform whereby their words are not translated to academic concepts or frameworks. You know, it really struck me, we recently launched the third book on Leroy's lived experience recovery organizations at the British Library in London with Dame Carol Black, who's the chair of the British Library. And all the authors were given the floor to speak at the launch at the British Library in London. And one chap stood up and he said, contacted by David to write this chapter, he said, and I was told that I could use whatever words I wanted and that there would be no editing of my expression. He said, so I sent it to David and various drafts and he said, but it only once it was published, he said, I checked the book. He said, because I wanted to know how he changed even a single one of my words. He said, because previously working with all of these academics, these professors, that always reworded everything that I'd said, that put it through the academic frameworks, applying it to concepts which removed it from what he was trying to say. And he said this was the first time, and he got emotionally got choked up as he was expressing it. This was the first time that nobody as an academic had changed a single word that I'd said. And I thought, yes, that's it. Yeah, that's it.

Do you think, you know, you were talking about tokenism and TikTok exercises? and so, you know, my next question was going to be around whether you think lived experience has been excluded or undervalued in in the in the scientific discourse. You've touched on that, but you're welcome to share more reflections. But I'm wondering whether you think in their current forms or in how they've been used, community advisory boards and theories of change workshops are just tick boxes or do you think some of them mean well or maybe they don't do they mean well but they don't actually deliver in terms of demonstrating participatory component? What do you think about them?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's complex and it's nuanced and I think there's a whole range of practice, some of whom are very genuine and authentic and are doing brilliant co-production work. But I think the other thing that we need to bear in mind is that for decades, people who've entered academia, we've been trained and groomed into these, using these methods and these metrics and these tools. So now all of a sudden, some of the funding landscape language is changing some of the metrics for promotion is including lived experience and people are hearing the buzzwords, but they've got no idea what it means and how to do it. And so oftentimes what gets put inside the textbooks is not the authentic kind of versions of the methodology. Like when you go back to the roots of co-production Goodman, we've got to go back to Latin America. We've got to go back to, you know, America during the civil rights protests.

And it wasn't about give me a seat at your table. It was actually radically changing the centralized services of education, housing, the voting rights, employment rights. This isn't kind of let's do a band-aid reform. This is a critical acknowledgement that the very basis upon the structures of our society are ill, they're wrong, know, they've been polluted. And so, that's why it's hard to get genuine co-production because it's radical and it's transformative. It's not reform. It's not band-aid and it's not inclusion. So I think there's a bit of a training gap with people as to knowing A, what it truly is. And then secondly, how to do it. Then I think you've got a third group. The first group is genuinely doing it. Second group are maybe trying to do it but not fully understanding what it is and how to do it.

Unfortunately, we do have a third group, and maybe there are more than three groups, you know, third group who are just taking it to tick the boxes to get the money to do the project and to get the funding. You know, we have to acknowledge that those people are out there.

So having said that, in your opinion, this obviously would would, you know, result in a gap if if we're not really being completely co productive and we're not really incorporating the perspectives of folks who are gonna need the service, use the service, have experience with the with the with the challenges. How does the exclusion in your perspective really impact on the relevance and effectiveness of interventions that come out of these?

Yes, brilliant question. And of course it has to, because we've got an incomplete knowledge base. So it's not that the science is bad, it's incomplete. And so having just one form of voice pollutes the knowledge base. And the problem is, so you remember I was saying that the system isn't the problem, the science is not the problem, the enemy, but it's the illusions that it creates. And so because we've got this kind of one slice of the pie, metaphorically speaking, pretending it's the whole pie, that's the problem. And as long as we acknowledge that, then it's fine to keep using the old methods and metrics alongside these other forms. But what we need right now are people, institutions, and projects that bring them together so that the knowledge and the science is expanded. So yes, we have a data gap as a result of the exclusion of certain people from the knowledge production, certain voices and certain methods in the knowledge production process. Of course we do, because here's the thing. Let's just take the old positivistic form. What traditionally is required is you get a white middle-aged academic like myself come along who has to create a survey. So we've got to look back because remember it's theory driven. So I look back at all the previous studies.

In order to get the funding, I can't cite the radical studies. I've got to cite the mainstream studies. So it's a bit like a mafia. It's gangsterism kind of dressed up as science. So I've got to cite all of these mainstream studies to show that I'm following in their footsteps in order to get legitimacy. And so my questions and my hypothesis has got to be aligned to theirs. Slightly expanded, of course, a little step forward, but nothing too much now, like, you know, let's rein this in. Right. So as a result of that, we've got this narrow prism of knowledge production. And so we're missing this, you know, two thirds of the pie, if you like. And so for me, when I, if you think, okay, so I'm a white middle-aged academic creating this survey, I've never used drugs and I've never been in addiction. So I'm floundering around trying to come up with questions that's going to create the knowledge that we need to solve X and Y problems. Well, how can I do that? I can't. So it's early when you do these more participatory forms of knowledge production, participatory action research, where you say, actually, okay, you know, I lead a global photovoice project. And so what we do is we train people up in photovoice and we kind of say, you know, what works in addiction recovery?

And so it's the people in recovery then who become the researchers go out and collect the data, not in the form of words, because, know, again, the white European loves words, but not all forms of knowledge are written. Some are spoken, some are visual, some are embodied, some are expressed in artifacts and rituals and dance and movement. Knowledge takes many different forms. So in this particular project, it's visual. Yeah. Photographic.

And so as a result, people have then gone off and shown us what works in addiction recovery that we could never have discovered previously. Why? Because we could never have asked the question. We didn't know to ask those questions to find those forms of answers. So they've added and enriched the knowledge base through this PhotoVoice project and shown us things about how recovery works in ways that we've never known before.

Because we've let go of control. Yeah. And like, you know, in the funding application, I could never say the outcomes of this project would be the impact of this project would. And so we've got to check, it requires more radical change to unleash and to compliment this knowledge base.

So, you know, what what comes across for me, David, is this is this notion that when we start a research project, we have all of these questions that we want to answer as scientists based on what the literature has directed us to say. This is where this is where the gap is. And and our curiosity is often informed by how we've engaged with the literature and and for ourselves agreed on what the gaps are. But allowing participation allows us to expand that question pool to to those communities that will actually benefit from whatever the outcomes of the research are. Yes. I I I guess one question from my side, leading on from that is, you know, we're talking a lot about the scientists and how exclusionary they are and and how they could do better to bring in lived experience more. But on the if I flip the coin a little bit, do the purveyors or do the lived experience community themselves have a responsibility to meet the formal scientific sector in the middle. So what's their responsibility here? What do they need to do?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, remind me to come back fully to answering that, but let me just say this, because it's just triggered from what you've just said, is that, you know, oftentimes, the lived experience community doesn't realize the power of their role, and that they are knowledge producers and the seismic shift that they hold in the knowledge that they possess. So they don't even think that they've got a role to play.

And again, you know, that links as one of the, in the previous episode, thinking about my own childhood experiences, that certain types of people who've been the chosen ones to be in these positions and in these roles, it links very much back to that. So we've got to empower the lived experience community, make them aware, this is your role. This is the knowledge you possess, utilize it, be in these conversations, be in these projects, shape them, ask the questions, challenge offer the solution, so on and so forth. But absolutely, know, co-production is not an excuse then just to get on your soapbox and reverse the hierarchy. Yeah. So where previously, you know, the people with the PhDs are at the top of the tree and the lived experience is towards the end of that bottom of the hierarchy. We're not seeking to reverse that now and go, okay, lived experience is on top and the other people are on the bottom with the PhDs, et cetera.

Genuine co-production collapses the hierarchy and it's about genuine relationships and there's that mutuality of learning, mutuality and respect for one another, one another's viewpoints and knowledge bases and where that comes together and synthesizes and synergizes and also rubs up and challenges, that's where the magic comes out. That's where the knowledge transforms. That's certainly what I've seen in the projects that I've been involved in, where there is that mutuality.

That's great. So so in in in some ways you're saying the community of lived experience have an experience in addition to their personal lived experience of having been excluded. And so they they may not have the tools to step up and actually speak for themselves. So part of the responsibility is capacitating them. Yeah. They know how to do that and and how to represent their voice in those con in in those in those contexts.

And they're evidence because, yeah, here's what traditionally happened, isn't it? Okay, so we'll be holding an event like, you know, we'll have all some of the official people doing their PowerPoint presentations with their bullet points and their statistics, okay? They're always given first precedence. They're always the keynote speakers. And somewhere along the line in the program, we'll have some one, maybe a few lived experience people and often how it's labeled.

The evidence.

Sometimes their names aren't even featured in the program. I heard feedback recently there was a big event and it was just like, lived experience speaker. Okay. Or the other way it's framed is, Sally will share her story. What? When I get up as Dr. David Patton, I'm not introduced as, now David will share his story, but it's all just storytelling in a way. Yeah.

And so we belittle lived experience knowledge as story. And now there's two ways of kind of looking at this in kind of meaning making and story production, story is valid and valuable. But in the positivistic kind of scientific world, if you're saying story, it's belittled as soft knowledge. It's her individual experience. It's peculiar to her. And I think, and intentionally what happens when you have lived experience speakers speaking and traditionally what they're often instructed to do is tell us all of the trauma, tell us all of the juicy bits and tell us about the challenge and the darkness and everything negative. And then toward, we'll have a little bit of the rise of the Phoenix, okay? The glory story at the end, because we're obsessed with that kind of arc of storytelling.

And so there's that exploitation of manipulation of people with lived experience. But what that does as well, and intentionally, as well as all the manipulation I've just spoken about, to the audience, it's saying the people with the problems are people like them. And I'll make up some of the features of the story that if people who come from dysfunctional families, people who were abused physically, sexually, emotionally, people who had educational different, you struggles, people who grew up in poverty and didn't have access to jobs and careers and blah, blah, blah. So it's like people are pulling out as they're listening to the story. Well, I'm not like that. I didn't have that. And it reinforces them and us. And that again is not helpful. One of the reasons why so many people aren't accessing support for addiction is because they're going, I didn't know I was an alcoholic. I was a banker. I was a doctor. I didn't look like the homeless person on the street in addiction.

So I never knew that I was an addict. And so they're in addiction for an extra 10 years or whatever it may be because their own perception of what someone who needs to ask for help is, is not the one that they have in their mind. We promote it through the work that we do.

I guess the next question becomes in in trying to move in trying to shift the focus and and give lived experience folk a better position on the pedestal, how how can live experience move beyond just being anecdotal and become more convincingly recognized as structured and valuable evidence? What does that look like?

Yeah, and again, I think the answers to that are of multi-pronged and complex and still unfolding over time. But I think it's those people who are in the current traditional positions of power, of knowledge production, extending their platforms, extending their projects to be adopting these more participatory action forms of doing research and knowledge exchanges, it's coming with a humility and I think a criticality. So oftentimes when I'm speaking, I will acknowledge the harms and the deficits of the traditional approaches used by people in my industry. And I bring a humility to the limitations of the ways in which knowledge is being produced and the way in which projects have been led. A bit of a confessional. Because that then, I think it offers some level of repair and apology to those communities and those people groups. It also recognizes that the science and the evidence base has got flaws and there are alternatives. And I think we need to be offering those alternatives tangibly. So I think New Central Media is one way in which we can do that, offering a publishing platform.

They get to decide the agenda and what goes inside the books. But also, the approach that we've taken there in terms of how you marry science and lived experience knowledge bases is that we used a research framework. So we used recovery capital, personal, social and community, and we use strengths and barriers as a means through which people could structure their chapters so that it wasn't story.

And we certainly were not asking people to tell us all of the grim details, but we wanted it to be framed linking to the research knowledge base. So that's one small example that you can kind of offer that. I think also as we're applying for future projects and future funding grants, that we're applying with people with limited experience as co-applicants, as co-PIs rather than as applying by ourselves and that we involve them in that agenda setting from the outset. What does your community want to know? How should we go about this? So, they're setting the methodologies and the tools that we will use. And we need to think beyond surveys and interviews and focus groups. my gosh, you know, I've done all three of those and they're valid. They do produce knowledge, which is sound.

But as I was talking about earlier, they missed so much. And I remember I was working on an NIHR project that Professor David Best was leading. And they've done the surveys, they've done interviews, and then David Best said to me, would you go back to the community and ask them to help us analyze the findings and maybe kind of produce something. So I went along and the idea was that we shared the findings as we saw them. We said, what do you see?

and would you help us produce a little A5 booklet around kind of what's working in recovery? And they laughed at us and they said, no, we don't want to do a booklet. Nobody reads books. Because they knew that people in their community had diverse levels of education and qualifications, so they didn't want to exclude people who couldn't read and have literacy levels. So they said, we want to do something that's much more digital, people that can access anywhere. So they created a digital whiteboard.

Again, using a research framework, we had different stages of recovery. So Betty Ford Institute kind of said, you know, there's early recovery, which is the first year, sustained recovery, which is years one to four, and stable recovery years five plus. And so people then deposited artifacts onto this grid of personal, social, and community capital by stage of recovery. And so they submitted things like, some of them were artists.

So they submit their drawings, their paintings, their photos of their graffiti art. Some people were singers. And so they'd made albums and they'd kind of done videos on YouTube of them singing. So they submitted their songs. Some people were poets and so they'd done spoken word and they submitted videos of them speaking spoken word. mean, you know, the creativity, some people had done tapestries and potteries, you name it. It was all like on this smorgasbord of knowledge in so many different forms. think there was 24 different forms of knowledge on this whiteboard in artifacts and rituals and creativity. And for somebody, just thought, wow, if I was somebody who was starting recovery, you know, on the brink of going, okay, I've had enough of addiction. I want to make a different choice. Having access to that digital whiteboard, it's just a masterclass in a range of tools and approaches as to how to overcome addiction.

And it was just fantastic. There's no way that myself or anyone as an academic researcher, we would ever have come up with that idea. Yeah. It was driven through the community, given their knowledge, they knew what their community needed.

So I think tying in that that co-creation process with the idea that when you submit for a grant, you bring the community along, you're really talking about shared ownership of the ideas and also shared ownership in or investment in the success of the project. Yes. I guess perhaps as a closing question for this section, what I might ask is in your view, on a practical level, you've you probably touched on some ideas already, but just to tie us up, is how can professionals and communities more actively work together to generate knowledge. So what are the sort of the takeaway bullets there?

Yeah. So things about relationships, you know, how many academics just exist in the ivory tower. So all they know is other academics. And I think, you know, and that's not a criticism of you if you're listening and you are in that position, but it's an invitation to come outside and to play, you know, and I was, I used to be that person more so because I was scared and I didn't understand like what role that I had to collaborate and co-produce knowledge with the community and people in these organizations that didn't understand what it could look like. So, you know, start exploring in your own community what organizations are out there, drop them an email and say, can we have a meeting to see how I can learn more about the work that you do and the problems that you're facing. It's got to be built upon the first step is always genuine authentic relationship and curiosity as to what's occurring in the community and what are the issues that that community is facing. The rest of it really then builds from there. So, you know, I know some type A kind of academics that like to have five year plans and, you know, have their goals all set out, but here's a word of encouragement. You're going to have to let go some of that if you want to do genuine co-production and work with communities, because it can't be your agenda and your shoehorning in the community. Because first of all, the community will smell that mile off and you will be excommunicated very quickly. Because they've been exploited for decades and academics have come around time and time and time again. So build genuine authentic relationships, be curious and be willing to let go and share power.

I think you've really helped us to rethink what we mean when we talk about evidence and whose voices shape that evidence and and what steps we can take to generally be more curious, come out and play. David, in our next episode, and we hope you'll join us again, and we're gonna explore how these ideas translate into practice. we'll look at some participatory methods.

We look at storytelling and innovative approaches that bring lived experience right in the middle into research and policy spaces. Hope you'll join us then, David. Thanks again.

Thanks so much Goodman, great to talk.

Thank you for spending this time with us. We hope you enjoy that as much as we do. Be sure to hop on over to our website, isop.net, where you'll find information on how to sign up for free membership. Take care and catch you on the next one.