Tag Archives: participatory

4.3. Sonic postcards as an arts-based approach to encourage collaboration

Source: LGriffin

Seminar on the 26 February 2025

Sonic postcards as an arts-based approach to encourage collaboration.

In this session, we would like to discuss a recent project that explores some of the ways in which arts-based thinking and practice might intervene productively to support transformative action and environmental planning at the local level. A project with George Revill from the Open University used arts-based practice to find ways of opening up spaces of engagement.

Source: GReville

Our work was part of an attempt to find ways to use creative and co-produced materials more systematically within policy engagement. We co-produced a short sonic documentary called Fishing for Life, which is currently being hosted at the Wells Maltings Arts Centre.

‘Fishing for Life’ is a sound work called a ‘sonic postcard’ co-created with stakeholders, fishers, researchers and a sound artist for a UKRI project called Sounding Coastal Change. Fishing for Life explores the social, economic, and environmental challenges facing fishing communities and the strategies that fishers use to cope with them.
Sonic postcards are co-produced pieces made by publics, researchers and sound artists working together in ways which creatively assemble and voice otherwise ‘unheard’ human and non-human voices. They work with sound, voice, music and different kinds of listening. They do not tell or instruct but are instead intended to raise awareness to enhance sensitivity and attentiveness to issues that might otherwise be unnoticed. A primary aim is to stimulate better-informed discussion around the issues concerned in order to generate productive dialogue and learning.
We would like to reflect upon the social and political roles that arts-based methods and creative practices might perform and, in particular, how they can encourage and enable engagement, collaboration, and learning around environmental challenges: processes that are all central to successful planning.

Liza Griffin is an Associate Professor of Urban Health and Environmental Politics at UCL’s Development Planning Unit, Bartlett. Liza’s research on urban health and spatial politics includes projects on community responses to urban flooding, relationships between greenspaces and wellbeing, and placemaking for people with dementia. Her work on ‘Creative Practice and the Anthropocene’ explores how publicly engaged arts-based thinking and practice can intervene productively in the current environmental crisis.

George Revill is Professor of Cultural Historical Geography at The Open University. His work is concerned with landscape as a way of understanding past and contemporary experience and understanding of place, environment, and nature. Research projects involving creative practice include the AHRC funded “Earth in Vision,” focusing on digital broadcast archives and environmental history, “Sounding Coastal Change” and “Sounding Out Wells” which used sound and music to explore environmental and social changes on the North Norfolk coast.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

The Practice As Research network with its resources is free and always will be, but it does of course incur costs to run and to keep it running. If you use it and benefit, enjoy it and would like to keep it going, please, consider leaving something in the tip jar. Thank you!

4.1. Discomfort and vulnerability as a research process

Source: LPrice

Seminar on the 7 November 2024

Discomfort and vulnerability as a research process.

In this seminar, Leri Price discusses discomfort and vulnerability within the context of her research with Syrian women living in Scotland.

Creative methods are often embraced as a means of addressing the power imbalance between participant and researcher. Committing to this does involve risk on the part of the researcher, however. How can researchers respect participants’ agency while also ensuring that they answer their own needs? And how far can, or should, discomfort be a part of this process?

During this seminar, Leri Price reflects on various encounters that occurred during fieldwork with Syrian women in Scotland on the subject of “home”, including instances where participants renegotiated the inclusion of objects in the research, and examples of avoiding engagement with the research topic. Although all parties continued to be warm, open, and engaged, the research process was subverted and/or redefined by the participants. These refusals led to what might be deemed “failed” fieldwork as Leri did not obtain the data she had anticipated gathering using creative and arts-based methods. Furthermore, Leri reflects on the implications of working in Arabic rather than her first language, English.

The presentation considers how these encounters affected the research. Vulnerability, while uncomfortable and exposing, was a key part of this reflective process and continues to be integral to her research practice. Leri takes the opportunity to reflect on what “radical openness” (Gilroy, 2004) and “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) look like in this context, how discomfort and how an openness to perceived challenges ultimately opened up new avenues of exploration and more ethically engaged research.

Leri Price is a doctoral researcher in the Intercultural Research Centre at Heriot-Watt University and her research works with Syrian women living in Scotland to explore meanings of home. She is particularly interested in exploring embodied and affective methodologies. Outside academia, Leri is a translator of Arabic literature. Her translation of “Where the Wind Calls Home” by Samar Yazbek is currently a Finalist for the 2024 National Book Award.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

Creative and participatory approaches to reduce alcohol harm in Nepal

Image shows women in Nepalese clothing entering a religious space.

Source: Sushma Bhatta

In this blog post Dr Ranjita Dhital presents creative and participatory approaches to reduce alcohol harm in Nepal.

Though most people in Nepal do not consume alcohol, but those who drink do so in increasingly harmful ways. This has become a worrying trend in Nepal, leading to increased health and social problems for the drinker, their families, and communities. Alcohol has a long historic and cultural significance in Nepal. It is used in religious ceremonies, community festivals and other activities (see picture). In particular, the harmful custom of consuming locally made alcohol is concerning (usually made from grain and ranging from 10% to 40% of pure ethanol). There is also a growing harmful illicit market in the sale of this unregulated alcohol, and many poor communities rely on this as their main household income.

Image shows a bottle of coke filled with locally produced unregulated alcohol, which is often produced from fermented or distilled grain.

Source: Sushma Bhatta

Of the limited alcohol research and policy development in LMICs, very few have explored perspectives, contexts or experiences of individuals and communities. There is also no known intervention which has led to significant reduction in alcohol harm in Nepal. In LMICs’ health systems, resources including healthcare staff are limited. Therefore, alternative approaches are needed to increase availability and access to care by harnessing existing community assets more effectively. The use of cultural and community assets in public health can reduce stigma, raise awareness, and enable engagement of diverse communities. Such public health approaches would require participatory and co-design methodologies to examine cultural and community assets, including the arts, cultural heritage sites, natural environment, and community groups on their potential to reduce alcohol harm and associated risks.

First steps to exploring alcohol use in Chitwan District of Nepal:

We first scoped the breadth of existing cultural and community assets and how these were perceived by alcohol users and community health workers. The study was conducted in Chitwan, south-central Nepal, known to have considerable alcohol problems. Participatory asset mapping was conducted using field notes, photography, and through engaging with communities to explore how community assets affect alcohol consumption.

Semi-structured photovoice interviews were conducted with harmful drinkers (n= 12) (assessed through the validated Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) screening questionnaire) and community health workers (n= 6). During the interviews, participants used their photographs to reflect on how community assets influenced alcohol consumption and their relationship with alcohol.

Following thematic framework analysis three themes were produced: ‘influences and impact of families and communities’; ‘culture and spirituality’; and ‘nature and the environment’. The community mapping generated five factors which increased alcohol consumption: (1) availability; (2) advertising; (3) negative attitudes towards users; (4) festivals/gatherings; and (5) illiteracy/poverty. Six assets that discouraged consumption were: (1) legislation restricting use; (2) community organisations; (3) cultural/spiritual sites; (4) healthcare facilities; (5) family and communities; and (6) women’s community groups.

Those from certain ethnic groups consumed more alcohol, experienced family discord, or felt stigmatised due to their drinking. Assets such as ‘festivals/gatherings’ and ‘negative attitudes toward users’ and the theme ‘family and communities’ concerned with relationships and community activities were perceived to both promote and reduce alcohol use.

This was one of the first known studies in Nepal to explore alcohol use within the context of cultural and community assets. This research identified new possibilities to build on participatory and arts-based research methods.

This study was funded by Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF; grant no. 48304AY). See open access link to study publication: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/17579139231180744

Current Alcohol Co-design and Community Engagement (ACE) study

Following the study in Chitwan our interdisciplinary researchers and collaborators from Nepal and UK are co-producing the first known Critical Realist Review to examine a range of evidence (Dhital et al, forthcoming). The review will include published research from Nepal which have incorporated creative or participatory approaches in their methodology, policy documents and cultural resources considered to be assets by communities to reduce alcohol harm. To understand the value these cultural assets our research team conducted sensory ethnographic work around the study area Patan (an area known for its significant cultural heritage near Kathmandu). This involved exploring possible connections between culture, health and social consequences of alcohol use through regular observations (note taking, photography and filming) and through engaging with local communities.

We also plan to host an interactive community festival with local communities, artists and stakeholders to enrich our study findings. This includes identifying possible training and support needs with local communities, make recommendations to inform policy and plan future research. This study will support WHO Nepal’s work to reduce alcohol harm and strengthen its implementation roadmap in line with WHO’s Global alcohol action plan 2022–2030 and Sustainable Development Goals.

The ACE study is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, Grant Reference AH/X003973/1) and UCL Arts and Sciences Department Research Development fund awarded to Ranjita Dhital.

Dr Ranjita Dhital is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Health Studies in the Arts and Sciences Department (UASc), Director of Research and Graduate Research Tutor. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health (FRSPH), a registered pharmacist and a sculptor.

Her public health research is informed by creative and participatory methodologies. Her research applies arts and community-based approaches to reduce alcohol harm and promote mental wellbeing in high- and low-income countries. She is also using creative Participatory Action Research and Experience-based Co-design methods to optimise community pharmacy spaces (PRUK Leverhulme Fellowship) – The Architecture of Pharmacies.

She has practised as an addiction specialist pharmacist for the NHS, a community pharmacist and worked in public health. She founded and leads the ‘Creative Nepal: Arts-Health Community’ and the ‘International Arts in Pharmacy network’ . She is Chair of the ‘Royal Society for Public Health’s Arts Health and Wellbeing SIG’ and co-leads the ‘Neurodiversity In/& Creative Research Network’. She is the Director of Research and Graduate Research Tutor.

Treatment of loved ones with mental illness unveiled through body mapping: A collective workshop

Image of a body outline with photographs and writings on top. This is an example of body mapping from the workshop.

Source: MPizzolati

PAR network member and sociologist Micol Pizzolati designed and facilitated a workshop to explore the lived experiences of people whose close family members underwent mental illness and disorder treatments through body mapping.

Body mapping is a visual, narrative, and participatory approach which offers unique strengths and a wealth of ways to engage participants, that are considered knowledgeable, reflexive individuals who can articulate their complex life journeys and social circumstances by drawing, collaging, and writing in the shape of their life-size body.

The surfacing of mental troubles in a family circle presents tough challenges in maintaining interconnectedness and relationships among family members in the face of unconventional behaviour and stigma, as they negotiate their needs and those of loved ones. Family members grieve for the person their mentally ill loved one has become and long for the person he or she once was, with a keen awareness of two distinct phases – pre- and post-illness personal life – and their connection to interpersonal relationships.

To explore these nuanced, varied aspects of mental illness in a family context, Micol involved activists from an association working in northern Italy to raise awareness of mental distress. A small group of mothers, sisters and nieces participated in a half-day collaborative workshop, developing individual body maps to generate and share stories.

Micol explains that engaging the sensory body through drawing and talking about emotional experiences via embodiment allows participants to consider these experiences intuitively, thus opening insights into the research process. The embodied research experience provided the opportunity to draw closer to the density of the participants’ lives. Active imagination, images, and words prompted new perspectives to the understanding of remarkably different and vivid experiences of obligations to care for family members with mental distress.

The participants’ body maps are moving expressions of the afflictions and powerful challenges they have encountered and continue to face.

Click here to read an article based on the workshop and/or contact Micol to find out more about body mapping.

Micol Pizzolati is an associate professor in sociology and co-head of the Creative Methods Open Lab Research Group at the University of Bergamo, Italy. She engages in participation and co-production in the social sciences, particularly through inventive epistemologies and embodied approaches.

3.7. Pedagogy, practice, play, and participation: Mutual learning in a co-created youth wellbeing project

Source: JPFortier

Seminar on the 8 July 2024

Pedagogy, practice, play, and participation: Mutual learning in a co-created youth wellbeing project.

In this seminar, Dr Julia Puebla Fortier discusses co-production between an academically trained researcher, artists, and young people.

One of the exciting possibilities for practice as research is gathering and acting on insight at all stages of a project’s evolution. Using principles of co-production and reflective learning, researchers, delivery partners and participants can actively shape, refine and assess intentions and outcomes.

Source: JPFortier

The Reach In Reach Out (RIRO) programme was co-created with young people to support their creativity and wellbeing and offer pathways to community engagement and volunteering in the cultural sector. The project targeted young people in the west of England living with physical or psychosocial challenges, at risk of social isolation, or transitioning to further education or employment. Through RIRO, the young people made extraordinary personal gains in creative skills, wellbeing and cultural management, and the project partner institutions strengthened their ability to engage with and co-create with youth.

Source: JPFortier

From the outset, we collaboratively designed a process to build understanding of our practice as it evolved. This presentation will explore how an academically trained researcher, artists, and young people can co-produce a reflective learning and evaluation process to improve practice in real time, collecting a variety of rich data to assess impact, produce guidance for replication, and build the creative research skills of young people and artists.

Download Dr Puebla Fortier’s slides in PDF.

Access the project toolkit here.

Dr Julia Puebla Fortier was the project co-lead of the RIRO project for Arts & Health South West. Her policy and academic experience, honed through work with multiple stakeholders and doctoral study at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has been transformed by using participatory, creative, and relational approaches in research, evaluation, and programme management. She has a particular interest in cross-sectoral collaboration for arts and health, the emotion work of creative health practitioners, training community researchers, and improving health and wellbeing of culturally diverse communities. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Bristol Medical School and does independent consulting.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

2.8. Ethics in practice – a panel discussion

Image of the logo for the Practice As Research PAR network Seminar on the 26th April 2023

Ethics in practice – a panel discussion

As Practice As Research takes many forms, the practicalities of engaging in research ethically also vary greatly. In this online seminar, the panelists draw on their personal research practices to discuss how to engage with research ethically. Dr Jo Collins focuses on the context of research in counselling and coaching practice, Dr Alison Finch explores participatory, egalitarian research with young adults, and Áine McAllister highlights ethics in the context of Poetic Inquiry with refugees.

Dr Jo Collins is a practicing coach and Senior Lecturer in counselling, coaching and mentoring at the Christ Church Canterbury University.

Dr Alison Finch is a registered nurse and nurse-research-practitioner. She is a cancer nurse, assistant chief nurse at UCLH and a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Academy member.

Áine McAllister is a Lecturer at UCL working in the context of Languages in Education and in Refugee Education. Find Áine on LinkedIn.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

2.7. The intricate ethics of participatory research: issues and challenges

A photo of Prof Banks with her hand on her chin

Source: SBanks

Seminar on the 1st March 2023

The intricate ethics of participatory research: issues and challenges

In this online seminar Professor Sarah Banks reflects on ethical challenges arising in participatory research.

Participatory research is becoming increasingly popular amongst academics, community organisations and research funders. This is research that involves people with direct experience of the issue being studied (e.g. homelessness, domestic violence, asylum seeking) in designing and carrying out the research, often in partnership with academics or other professionals, with the aim of influencing change in policy or practice. This type of research raises distinctive ethical challenges, particularly relating to power dynamics, partnership-working and social activism, and may not always be fully understood by institutional research ethics committees. This presentation will outline some of the main ethical challenges arising in participatory research, arguing for the importance of ‘everyday ethics’ focusing on human relationships and reflexivity as a counter-balance to the ‘regulatory ethics’ of institutional review processes, which emphasise rule-following and impartiality. It will also introduce the revised guidelines for community-based participatory research recently published by the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action, Durham University and the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement, www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/social-justice-community-action/research-areas/ethics-consultation/

Click to download Prof Banks’ slides in PDF.

Sarah Banks is Professor in the Department of Sociology and co-founder of the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action at Durham University, UK. The Centre promotes participatory action research for social justice in partnership with community-based organisations. With the Centre and members of the International Collaboration for Participatory Health Research (ICPHR), she has developed ethical guidelines for participatory research and offers training/events for academic and community-based researchers. She has coordinated several participatory research projects, including research on debt, poverty and community development, and leads the Ethics Working Group of the ICPHR. She is co-editor of Ethics in Participatory Research for Health and Social Well-Being (Routledge, 2019) and Co-Producing Research: A Community Development Approach (Policy Press, 2019), and co-author of Participatory Research for Health and Social Well-Being (Springer, 2019).

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

In conversation 7: Dr Hakan Ergül

The “In conversation” series aims to demonstrate the wealth, breadth and depth of what constitutes Practice As Research.

In this episode, Dr Nicole Brown talks to Dr Hakan Ergül.

Dr Hakan Ergül is a Lecturer in Media Studies in the UCL Knowledge Lab of the Department of Culture, Communication & Media at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. Hakan received his PhD in 2006 from the Graduate School of International Cultural Studies, Tohoku University, Japan, with my 5-years ethnographic inquiry on Japanese television production.

Hakan’s short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, and he is the author of Dedicated to Chrysanthemum (in TR: Krizanteme Adanmis, 2003) and Where Do the Noises Come From? (TR: Sesler Nereden Geliyor? 2009), anthology of short stories. His most recent books include Popularizing Japanese TV (author, Routledge 2019) and Universities in the Neoliberal Era (co-editor, Palgrave 2017).

Hakan’s current research examines the role of traditional and digital communication technologies in everyday life of vulnerable groups, including children, refugees, and urban poor from ethnographic perspective.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

1.9. Participatory activist research: Reflexivity, transparency and accountability

Seminar on the 1st June 2022

Source: Jenny Pickerill

Participatory activist research: Reflexivity, transparency and accountability
After briefly outlining what participatory activist research is, this talk will explore what it means to become intimately involved in activist projects as an academic researcher. Jenny will reflect on the need for transparency, accountability and a pragmatism in navigating the multiple demands of a neoliberal academy, activist temporalities, and personal emotions and politics in her work in community environmentalism.

Jenny Pickerill is a Professor of Environmental Geography and Head of Department of Geography at Sheffield University, England. Her research focuses on inspiring grassroots solutions to environmental problems and in hopeful and positive ways in which we can change social practices. She has published 3 books (Cyberprotest; Anti-war Activism; Eco-Homes) and over 30 articles on themes around eco-housing, eco-communities, social justice and environmentalism. She is currently completing her book Eco-communities: Living Together Differently.

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.

1.8. Drawing research: Using drawing as a participatory research paradigm

Source: Monica Sassatelli

Seminar on the 4th May 2022:

Drawing research: Using drawing as a participatory research paradigm
Drawing has had a place in social research for a long time, especially in anthropology as field note taking, but also more specifically and recently in arts-based research and visual studies. Social research on drawings is a well-established method in a variety of related areas from psycho-social research with children to market research. Research with drawings however, where both the artefact and the practice of drawing are a constitutive part of the production of knowledge being sought, often in collaboration with research participants, is rarer. In this talk Dr Monica Sassatelli looks into the latter, with particular focus on the affordances of narrative drawing.

There is some drawing involved in this presentation: please have some paper and a pencil or pen ready.
Here are some drawings from participants:

Source: RJ

Source: SBass

Source: NB

Download Dr Sassatelli’s slides.

Dr Monica Sassatelli is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. She is a cultural sociologist with research expertise on on cultural events and institutions, cultural policies and creative industries. Among her publications are the monograph Becoming Europeans. Cultural Identity and Cultural Policies and the edited collection Arts Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere. Recent articles include: “‘Europe in your Pocket’: narratives of identity in euro iconography” (Journal of Contemporary European Studies) and “Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds” (Theory, Culture and Society).

Subscribe to the recordings:
Video hosted on the PAR YouTube channel.
Audio hosted on the PAR Buzzsprout channel and can be listened to on Spotify, Apple podcasts or on other RSS podcast apps.