Led by Paul Addae, with Agnes Arnold-Forster and Caitjan Gainty, and in conjunction with policy colleagues at KCL and community researchers at the Brixton-based community organisation Centric, this pilot project on community activism and scepticism around health aimed to better hear, know, and understand the sceptical voices of Brixton – a culturally diverse and historically activist community in south London. Its goal was to explore methods of research that would keep activist-sceptic actors in the community at the centre. In keeping with the project goals, this was not an attempt to develop greater trust for healthcare within the community; its aim instead was to understand what a sceptical community can offer to conversations about where healthcare has gone wrong and how it can be made right.

The project began with the observation that there are good historical and contemporary reasons why communities of colour in Britain might be sceptical about healthcare and seeks to challenge the assumption that those hesitant about medical therapies or procedures or worried about their place in healthcare are irrational, ignorant, or prone to conspiratorial thinking. Rather than viewing health scepticism as a reflection of individual flaws, we understand it to be a measure of how well healthcare works. We are interested in bringing sceptical and activist voices from the Black community into the mainstream and exploring what they might tell us about where healthcare has gone wrong, how it has failed its constituent communities, and why it has sown discord and distrust rather than engendering faith and allegiance.

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A note on methodology: Because community research has tended to take from communities without giving back, this project centred on the work and methodologies of Centric, which employs and equips community members with the skills required to conduct research by community members, for community members. As part of our project, we offered both oral history methodologies training and contextual background about the history and contemporary of healthcare systems but left the research to our community colleagues, who shared findings but retained shared control over the data and its outputs. Throughout, we shared findings and feedbacks and invited community researchers to return at project's end to upskill us and our target audiences: healthcare professionals, researchers and policymakers.