Although involvement of the consumer is increasingly being advocated in health related research, it is not welcome universally. Furthermore, the underlying rationale is rarely made explicit. Policy makers, health care professionals, and researchers need to be clear about the benefits and ways of including lay perspectives and the criteria for evaluating these. Examples of lay involvement in setting research agendas, [1][2][3][4] methodological debate, 5 and specific projects 4 6 7 are accumulating, but little clear evidence about the benefits and costs of different ways of incorporating lay input into health services research is available.We outline two basic reasons for incorporating lay perspectives into research and discuss some common objections. A framework is offered to help clarify the dimensions of lay involvement in health research. We use the term "lay" to mean people who are neither health care professionals nor health services researchers, but who may have specialised knowledge related to health. This includes patients, the general public, and consumer advocates.

HighlightsThe concept of resilience has often been critiqued as it underestimates issues of equity and power in human-environmental systems.This paper, based on an analytical literature review, reveals four themes essential in understanding equitable resilience in practice.The themes (subjectivities, inclusion, cross-scale interactions, and transformation) are embedded in a definition of ‘equitable resilience’.By proposing a middle-range theory, we expand the system to include social, cultural and political factors that distribute resilience outcomes.Equitable resilience can be applied alongside existing resilience indicators to drive resilience practice towards more equitable outcomes.

My research at present centres on a large and hence necessarily long-term project that I call, depending on the occasion, either 'Thinking in Cases' or 'The History and Philosophy of the Case'. The project started, like most large branching structures that threaten to get out of their author's control, from small seedlings. Or perhaps, to alter the botanical metaphor, it started from three rhizomes, which have now intertwined, out of the public view, into a tangled network of themes and variations. I will attempt an exposition of my work in this field by describing the three rhizomes, which also necessarily involves some intellectual autobiography; I will go on to show how the network has become ever more complex and difficult to map; finally, I will ask your help in the task of managing, perhaps even pruning, the proliferation of the topics raised. So I will welcome enthusiasm for the project, but I will be even more eager to hear how paring, thinning out and even inhibiting of growth can be implemented. The three rhizomic structures I will call, for simplicity's sake: the psychoanalytic case history; the historical sociology of the sciences; the individual in the human sciences.Most of my research in the last 20 years has been devoted to the history and philosophy of psychoanalysis. I am, by early love and by university training, an historian and philosopher of science; so I have often viewed psychoanalysis from that perspective, whilst becoming reasonably well acquainted with other approaches: those of sociology, of anthropology, of literature, of psychology. The first question people ask me when they hear that I study psychoanalysis and that I am interested in the sciences is: Is psychoanalysis a science? I will not answer this question immediately, although what I have to say affects that question quite profoundly. But my initial response is always to be somewhat floored by the question. It is analogous to the question: Is jazz serious music?

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