Policy analysis is often done at a distance. Researchers (myself included) sit with policy documents, campaigns, or policy debates, and we dissect them using frameworks and theories. This process can reveal a lot — but it can also risk becoming insular. Whose perspectives are missing when only academics interpret? What blind spots are left unexamined when analysis happens in isolation?

These questions sat at the heart of a project I recently worked on with Rebecca Muir (Queen Mary University of London), published in Critical Policy Studies. We turned our attention to the NHS England’s 2022 cervical screening campaign and decided to try something different: to analyse the campaign not just ourselves, but alongside people with lived and professional experience of cervical screening.

In our workshops, co-analysts shared insights rooted in the realities of screening: the struggle of booking appointments, the trauma that certain medical encounters can trigger, the barriers of location, time, and trust. These reflections were grounded, detailed, and deeply human.

Photo credit: https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/empowering-diverse-voices-a-pledge-for-inclusive-choices

For me, one moment that stands out is when co-analysts began suggesting ways the approach to cervical screening could actually change. Their recommendations were practical and creative: mobile clinics in supermarkets or schools, self-sampling kits for privacy, trauma-informed communication, evening appointments for those who cannot attend during the day. These were solutions shaped by lived realities, not imagined from a distance.

What this project taught me is that centering diverse voices doesn’t just “add perspective” — it changes the analysis itself. It heightens critical scrutiny, pushes us to question assumptions, and brings forward knowledge that academic expertise alone cannot reach. It shifts policy analysis from being about people to being with people.

Of course, working this way is not without its challenges. It requires time, openness, and a willingness to let go of academic authority. In many ways, this resonates with Foucault’s ideas about power and knowledge: policy is not just a neutral response to problems, but a way of shaping how problems are defined and whose voices are heard in addressing them. By default, expert or institutional knowledge often dominates, producing what counts as “truth” about a given issue. Feminist scholarship has long pointed out that this reproduces hierarchies, marginalising other forms of expertise. What our workshops showed is that when people with lived and learned experience analyse alongside academics, different perspectives surface, and the boundaries of what policy analysis can be are expanded.

We attempted to disrupt that hierarchy, even if only briefly. The insights of our workshop members were not an add-on to academic critique — they were the critique. They sharpened the analysis and generated possibilities that may not have emerged otherwise.

This project has left me asking bigger questions: How can we reimagine policy analysis so that experience is not an afterthought, but a central part of knowledge-making? How can we design research that is not only critical of systems, but also attentive to the human realities those systems govern?