Engaging Youth in Social Innovation Labs to Promote Community Health: An examination of social innovation translation in urban contexts contextualised through elements of Actor-Network Theory
Creators: name: Ardiles, Paola
Publisher: name: Torrens University Australia
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 420606
subject: Social determinants of health

description: Over the past decade, scholarly consensus is that intersectoral collaboration to tackle social determinants of health require new approaches to promote meaningful engagement and action (Denaro et al. 2022; Harish et al., 2021; Martinez, Jones &amp; Connolly, 2020; Halpaap et al., 2019; WHO, 2017). Conversely, applied social innovation has been touted as influential for developing solutions, resulting in strong partnerships and advocacy to address complex issues in communities (Farmer et.al., 2018; Mason et al., 2015). Research remains embryonic due to lack of conceptual clarity, scientific evidence, and a consensus on definitions (Niekerk et al. 2021). Based on this backdrop, this research was based in Canada. A comprehensive review of literature between 2018-2020 revealed an evidence gap on the relationship between health promotion, youth engagement, and social innovation in urban community contexts. Hence the research question was: “How can youth participation contribute to social innovation that promotes community health in urban contexts?” Three core concepts of social innovation in relation to health promotion were revealed in the literature review (Chapter 1). Intersectoral collaboration is required for social innovations in health promotion, formation of new partnerships across sectors to address social determinants that fall outside of health systems; (2) Interdisciplinary thinking comprising of a wide range of disciplines were required to understand community health problems and (3) Community participation allows for the co-design of novel solutions based on the insights of communities impacted by the problem. In 2018, the researcher had co-designed and implemented “Bridge for Health social innovation lab” (Chapter 2) in a community context, in Canada. Inspired by the results, the researcher had chosen multiple case study method to design, implement, and reflect on two social innovation projects, situated in higher education (university) and urban community contexts, for 18 this doctoral thesis by publication. The Health Change Labs case study (chapter 3) engaged youth in co-designing community-based solutions for problems impacting health, through an applied transdisciplinary community-academic curricular program. The Surrey CityLab case study (chapter 4) was an experimental, systems-oriented, community-academic collaboration project, to engage youth in advancing municipal sustainability goals through the collaboration of community and academia. The research was contextualized using elements of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) grounded on the mechanics of power, as actors interact negotiating their networks (Callon 1986, Latour 1986, 1993). Unnithan (2014) had enhanced ANT by using its elements for visualising analysed results. Motivated from this work, ANT is not used as an ontological approach for this thesis, rather, it is used as a ‘contextualisation’ tool, explaining how the champion met the researcher for facilitating the case study, and explaining the context via elements of ANT. Thus, the researcher added a unique academic contribution to ANT body of knowledge. The results indicated that youth engagement in urban communities can drive social innovation through experiential learning and community-academic partnerships [Ardiles &amp; Ezegbe (2020) and Ardiles et al. (2021)]. The research also examined the ethical and equity dimensions and proposed the integration of equity centred design approaches into experiential learning curriculum for youth to advance social innovation to improve community health [see: Ardiles &amp; Fernando (2022)]. To apply an equity lens, the researcher developed a new EquityCentered Model for Applied Social Innovation Translation in Health (Chapter 7).