Capacity building Workshop: Communication for Research in Development

ADRAS project is unorthodox. When we think of other research project, ideas of publishing your research in top tier journals (AKA A*, A journals) might be project's priority.
In this project, apart from publishing and sharing the results to academic community, the Australian AID (DFAT) also suggested us to promote ideas and actions on capacity building with partners in the project. The impacts can and will be positive and perhaps larger.
In order to achieve this objective, I represent our team to Cholbri in Thailand to organise a capacity building workshop for 26 novice researchers and PhD. students at the Graduate School of Commerce, Burapha University. The focus of the workshop is communicating and disseminating research in business and community development.

Our team created contents and curriculum for this workshop from our current research on mining and development in Laos and Thailand. We worked with all participants to engage them to think about ways to create impacts from your research. I used a number of examples from international and local conferences that I attended to promote our project, meeting with the local authorities and media, writing and promoting policy brief to NGOs or civil society organisations, publishing in some journals and magazines, and being on social media.

The day was full with interesting conversation and ideas among participants who promise to engage their community and disseminate their developmental projects to various communication channels. We also created a network of developmental researcher where I will return to Burapha University and meet with them to listen to the next phase of their research plan.

Our team sincerely thank the Graduate School of Commerce at Burapha University to be very co-operative and supportive. We hope that this network will promote the concept of sustainability in the mining sector in Thailand.