About the Workshop

The first of our two evening sessions as part of our CDAS Annual Conference, this workshop is open to both conference participants and external attendees.

Patient involvement in research is often constrained to the role of data provider or advisor on pre-set agendas (Mader et al., 2018). Although collaborative approaches to health research challenge this restricted view of patients’ worth in knowledge creation (Beresford, 2013), patients living with a life-limiting illness are rarely involved. It is suggested this results from low confidence in how such involvement would benefit individual or research team (Johnson et al., 2021). However, it could be argued that individual patients are denied the opportunity to contribute effectively to an understanding of end of life by a failure to recognise the legitimacy of their lived experience (Barker et al., 2020). This workshop will explore the proposition that in some health and care research teams, some forms of knowledge are valued more than others, making the research less effective.

Graphic medicine uses comics to communicate the experiences of multiple actors – patients, carers, families and healthcare providers (Wombles, 2021) – including issues of power imbalance (Glazer, 2015). Taking the comic book ‘Anyone can co-produce health and care research … A little book about knowledge and justice’ (Roberts, 2025) as an example, this workshop will explore how comics can be used to challenge the belief that one person’s way of understanding and talking about a subject is more valid or worth more someone else’s. The workshop will also support participants to create their own short comic to illustrate their beliefs and experience around power and death in their particular context.

The Facilitator

Amanda Roberts is director of BEING MORTAL, a campaign which encourages us to celebrate life and acknowledge, talk about and plan for death, dying and grieving. Doing this helps to reduce fear, promotes wellbeing and empowers us to engage in end-of-life decision-making which fully reflects what matters to us as individuals.