Recent Publications and Projects from the CoDeRS Network
This section highlights recent publications, research outputs, and collaborative projects from our members. Grounded in critical social science and committed to health equity, these works reflect the diverse, reflexive, and interdisciplinary approaches that define our network. From peer-reviewed articles to public scholarship, our contributions aim to provoke thought, challenge norms, and inform action in health systems and beyond.
Qualitative Methods Case Study: Using MAXQDA in Indigenous HIV Journey Mapping Research
author name
-
This study presents a case study using MAXQDA, a Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS), to analyze interview data within the Northern HIV Journey Mapping Project, which explored the experiences of Indigenous people living with HIV in Manitoba, Canada. By adapting patient experience mapping and process mapping methods, the research team traced participant journeys through the HIV Care Cascade, identifying barriers and facilitators to well-being. Within a decolonizing framework informed by Two-Eyed Seeing and Ethical Space, we critically examined the role of CAQDAS in Indigenous health research, highlighting both its utility and its tensions with Indigenous storytelling traditions. Our methodological approach balanced Western analytical tools with Indigenous knowledge systems, ensuring that technology served the research rather than distorting the lived realities of participants. MAXQDA enabled data visualization that made complex, non-linear healthcare journeys more accessible to researchers and policymakers. However, the software’s structuring of qualitative data into discrete codes and categories raised epistemological questions about how Indigenous narratives are “treated” as data within a neoliberal knowledge economy. To mitigate these concerns, we engaged in reflexivity, involved Indigenous Elders and research associates, and emphasized relational accountability in both analysis and dissemination. This case study contributes to the field of qualitative methods by demonstrating how CAQDAS can be employed within decolonizing Indigenous research while acknowledging its limitations. Results suggest that while tools like MAXQDA enhance methodological rigour and knowledge mobilization, researchers must remain critically engaged with their impact on Indigenous ways of knowing. We recommend that future research prioritizes Indigenous-led adaptations of digital analysis tools and emphasize participatory approaches to ensure that qualitative research serves Indigenous communities in culturally responsive ways. Our reflections offer insights for scholars seeking to decolonize qualitative inquiry while maintaining methodological integrity in health research.
-
Safe spaces that matter: Material semiotics, affective bodies and queer readings of clinical spaces in Winnipeg…
author name
-
Communities that claim “2SLGBTQ+” (Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer plus) identities experience profound inequities within healthcare settings. In response, scholars and advocates have engaged in conversations about creating “safe space,” for them. These “safe spaces” are said to be produced through the display of objects such as pride flag stickers and queer inclusive posters, as well as through “queer friendly” staff trained to meet the healthcare needs associated with 2SLGBTQ + people. Such literature, however, often underplays the dynamic heteronormative spacialities of the clinic, and in particular the ways in which gender and/or sexual nonconforming patients negotiate feelings of safety within unequal social fields that assemble an array of human and non-human actors that present in medical space. Drawing on a qualitative study with 42 people identifying as queer and lesbian women and non-binary people living in a mid-sized Canadian city, we employ material semiotics to think through the networked effects of human and non-human entanglements that participants narrate as “safe” or “unsafe.” We argue that current understandings of “safe space” flatten the complex and textured interactions and affective dispositions emergent between queer patients and the clinical environment, and develop the concept of safe spaces that matter – sites of complex bodily and spatial engagements which are highly productive in rendering multiple accounts of the body as either legible in its (hetero)normativity or pathological in its alterity and unreadability. As such, a more spatially embodied and contingent picture of “clinical care” comes into view which, we maintain, is necessary in creating spaces that are truly open to the multiplicity of nonconforming embodiments which present themselves daily in medical space.
-
In Search of ‘Success’: The Politics of Care and Responsibility in a PrEP Demonstration Project
author name
-
We illustrate the lively existence of the notion of success in the unfolding of a PrEP project led by a sex worker organization in India. In what we call the “search for success,” particular attention is placed on the role that care plays among sex workers guiding the project. Drawing on our ethnographic work, we highlight how the search for success underlines particular affective dispositions that are underscored by overlapping temporal registers: in the early stages of fostering adherence; when project fatigue sets in; and as the project draws to a close, in the anticipation of what comes next for the organization.
-
From collaborator to colleague: a community-based program science approach for engaging Kenyan communities…
author name
-
Since the 1990s, researchers have used community-based participatory approaches to achieve outcomes relevant to local communities, to build collaborative and sustainable research infrastructures, and to address disparities in knowledge production. Notwithstanding these strengths, communities and researchers have questioned its success in addressing power imbalances inherent in collaborative research encounters. In this methodological paper, we describe a novel community-based program science approach to guide an interdisciplinary research project on HIV self-testing among men who have sex with men in three Kenyan counties. Drawing on ethnographic field notes, we detail how community researchers and their academic and programmatic partners collaborated through all phases of the research process, including research design and data collection. Importantly, community researchers also played an integral role in data analysis and dissemination, going well beyond the conventional role of ‘community engagement’ in global health research. We also present findings from qualitative interviews conducted by community researchers with their peers to inform the rollout of HIV self-testing kits in their respective county-contexts. Our approach highlights that engaging community directly in evidence production allows research findings – owned and generated by communities on their own behalf – to be fed more swiftly and effectively into community-led program delivery.
-
‘We are aspiring to something that is not achievable by natural means’: a material-semiotic …
author name
-
This study examines the socio-cultural dimensions of anabolic-androgenic steroid useamong queer men in Winnipeg, Canada, addressing a gap in research that oftenfocuses on risks and harms. Using qualitative methods, 17 semi-structured interviewswere conducted with current, former, and potential anabolic-androgenic steroid users.Findings reveal that anabolic-androgenic steroid use extends beyond individual healthrisks, acting as a ‘technology of the self’ that fosters physical transformation, personalempowerment, and social belonging. Participants highlighted the influence of socialmedia and queer community aesthetics, navigating tensions between idealised bodynorms and lived realities. For many, anabolic-androgenic steroid use enhanced self-worthand social connections but simultaneously reinforced hegemonic masculinity andsystemic inequities, particularly for men of colour. These practices reflect deeplyintertwined relationships between the body, identity, and notions of community. Thestudy criticises interventions narrowly focused on harm, advocating for compassionate,culturally informed policies that address the lived experiences and aspirations of queermen who use anabolic-androgenic steroids. By situating their use within broadersocio-technical and ethical fields, the research calls for nuanced approaches thatacknowledge the intersecting pressures shaping engagement with body enhancementpractices.
-
Navigating the “rabbit hole”: An embodied and affective account of patienthood and chronic illness
author name
-
Feminist scholars studying chronic illness have drawn on the notion of personhood to develop the concept of patienthood, highlighting the socially and culturally constructed nature of this subjectivity. To further conceptualizations of patienthood, I conducted arts-based qualitative research, asking: how do young women and gender-diverse adults living with chronic illnesses understand and experience patienthood? Multimedia collage workshops with 10 women and nonbinary people living with chronic illnesses invited participants to create “portraits of patienthood.” My analysis of the artwork continues the interdisciplinary work of conceptualizing patienthood by reading the art through critical disability scholar Margaret Price's notion of “crip spacetime.” Together, Price's theory and participant accounts illuminate the deeply relational, embodied, and affective dimensions of patienthood as shaped by the entanglement of social, material, cultural, and psychological factors. This study identifies the metaphor of the “rabbit hole” as an apt description of the complexities inherent in navigating the fluctuating nature of chronic illness amid a lack of systemic support.
-