HARENE: Fostering Francophone Community-based Participatory Harm Reduction Research

Harm Reduction Journal is calling for submissions to our Collection on HARENE: Fostering Francophone Community-based Participatory Harm Reduction Research. Producing scientific knowledge on harm reduction means including people who use drugs (PWUD) in ‘participatory and community-based research’ (CBPR), a validated and demonstrated scientific approach.

Harm reduction advocates a more central contribution of PWUD in CBPR. Specifically, by sharing their lay knowledge and living experiences, PWUD can improve other stakeholders’ understanding of their realities and needs, thereby informing the design of suitable interventions. 

Ensuring that scientific knowledge can be disseminated, accessed, and communicated in different languages is one way to encourage communities to participate in research. However, for many non-native academic researchers, publishing in English (the scientific world’s primary language) is not possible without extra funding for copyediting/translation services. For community-based associations with a non-academic background who desire to participate in CBPR, this linguistic and financial barrier is even greater. 

The CBPR-based harm reduction network HARENE wishes to reduce this barrier by helping associations in France to publish their work in English, with a view to increasing the diversity of science and knowledge and reducing the production of ignorance and undone science. Publishing a France-specific collection in Harm Reduction Journal would not only promote this endeavor, it would encourage other non-academic CBPR stakeholders in harm reduction to follow suit.