Creative practices
Using creative practices as part of community work is an important strand in ongoing MHRC activity. Dr Alessia Zinnari (Lecturer in Italian) has been leading on a community engagement project around photography, writing and wellbeing, called ‘CAMERA’ (Creative Approaches to Memory and Emotions through Research and Art) – funded by AHRC, The University of Glasgow, and the Founders Fund for Creatives. Dr Cheryl McGeachan (Senior Lecturer in Geographical & Earth Sciences) has been collaborating with Professor Christopher Philo on ‘Geopsychiatry-in-action’, a project funded by MQ Mental Health Research that created geo-stories of mental ill-health with a storyteller and lived experience participants. Dr Lindsay Balfour (Senior Lecturer in Communications) has been working on an ESRC-funded project that uses arts-based methods in co-production workshops to build toolkits for technologically-facilitated gender-based violence.
Several MHRC members are working with playfulness as a creative method. Dr Megan Coyer (Senior Lecturer in English Literature) has been working with Dr Matthew Creasy (Senior Lecturer in English Literature) on an adaptation of the boardgame Pandemic, which explores the 1832 cholera outbreak in Glasgow. Dr Tim Peacock (Lecturer in History and War Studies and Director of Games and Gaming Lab) has been working on the project Wargaming Wellbeing alongside a variety of research-led games, including (vector-borne illnesses in Uganda), HOPE AGE (humanitarian operations), Broken Canvas (AI cyber resilience/affecting healthcare), Project Tempest (flooding) and D4Mation (water scarcity). Dr Dieter Declercq (Lecturer in Medical Humanities (Narrative Medicine)) has received BA/Leverhulme and AHRC funding for an ongoing collaboration with stand-up comedian Dave Chawner on stand-up comedy workshops for eating disorder recovery. He is also collaborating with Dr Ambrose Gillick on the commercialisation of MAPL (Make Play) workshops for creative thinking, which involves community work in Glasgow and Kent.
Alongside community engagement, Declercq’s MAPL project has also explored the uses of playfulness in medical education and training, including work with NHS healthcare professionals. Similarly, Dr Mila Daskalova (British Academy Postdoctoral & LKAS Fellow in English Literature) has been collaborating with the Royal College of Psychiatrists and various NHS Core Psychiatry Training Programme Directors around poetry writing workshops for trainee psychiatrists.