To have a greater diversity of voices included in this project, our plan is to make sure we have high participation of women, and people from the BAME community.

At its heart, the project is including the voices of disabled people*. As CRISPR technology is focused on editing out inherited diseases, our research group will consist of those within the range of inherited diseases.  They will be part of and contribute to the development of bodies of work through participatory practice led methods, this will include the development of a set of sci-art toolkits.

We are also very aware that Covid-19, along with other socio-economic restrictions, has acted detrimentally on the BAME communities in the UK. Our plan is to make sure to have a representative sample of people from the BAME communities in all of our focus and participatory projects.  Through working with our scientific partners, we hope to understand how CRISPR research takes into consideration the voices of excluded communities in both methods and results. 

Gender inclusion will always be part of the consideration of all elements and stages of activity.  We are again aware that the impact of the current crisis is hitting women extremely hard and we plan to develop an equality framework which influences design, planning and delivery of all elements of our project. For example, events and workshops to be held on suitable days and times to be inclusive of community members.

We are not going to assume all participants are digitally native, and as such we will provide alternative methods of communication and we will develop physical toolkits for posting to participants for an at reach level of engagement.