Conference Agenda

As a community embedded researcher (CER) on REALITIES (Researching Evidence-based Alternatives in Living, Imaginative, Traumatised, Integrated, Embodied Systems), we have been exploring how to reimagine our health services and systems through Flip of the Coin CIC. We are a nature-based community arts organisation which is women and lived experience-led. We have been exploring new approaches to implementing equitable and effective public health initiatives. We have co-production at our core; our participants are community members and decision makers, and as our research highlights issues and inequalities within our community, we work together to address them.

The entanglements between creativity, greenspace and sharing lived experience have allowed this project to become something unexpectedly powerful. We started out exploring how we could reimagine our health system and have found ourselves in a place where our lived experience is proving to be a vital and integral part of what we do and how we connect to each other. The merger of lived experience, creativity, natural greenspace and deeply honest conversations between everyone involved has meant that we are having a greater impact on community health and wellbeing than foreseen. It has also meant that these elements have all become so deeply entangled in the healing process that unpicking where one starts and another ends is impossible. By allowing the project to become in its own way, without forcing it, has meant that it is constantly becoming in response to the people who intra-act with it.

Through case studies, testimonials and works of art we are documenting how community health is impacted by belonging to a community garden with a strong focus on the strength and solidarity found in creating and sharing lived experience.

This paper presentation is an overview of a Welsh health board (CTMUHB) supported research project that took place between 2020-2025. The arts based interventions that the research focuses on took place in a "field" hospital in Wales- a temporary hospital set up during the COVID-19 global pandemic- and in the local community, culminating in an event that took place on a community field during COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. Situated in South Wales, UK where the author/ presenter is based it illustrates the transformative quality of storytelling and other arts based and social presecribing practices within statutory health services. All participants identified as being adversely impacted by the pandemic and the associated social restrictions. The research drew on storytelling methodology and enabled the participants involved to take part via the means that had most resonance for them; usually linked to the intervention they had "received". This included poetry, short stories, art work and dialogue with the researcher, which was transcribed. The poems, spoken words, stories and art works were treated as "vibrant matter" (Bennett, 2010) and the researcher/ paper presenter created her own art work and poetry as response; to sit together as a collective art installation. This is an example of practice and practice-based research as co-construction (Simon and Salter 2019, 2020) and situates those involved in the project as active, agential storytellers. Stories, storytellers and witnesses are all framed as active agents in a material-discursive world (Barad 2007; Simon and Salter 2019). Learning points from the research includes the importance of bearing witness to the stories we tell; and the potential for arts for health interventions (and research into those interventions) to be vehicles for personal and social transformation. Examples of these stories of transformation will be shared through the presentation as well as other key learning points.

This presentation reflects on my experience of researching community-led housing in England and, from that experience, offers suggestions for how researchers might consciously bring their whole selves to qualitative work. I describe a simple model of five elements, drawn from Tibetan wisdom traditions, that captures the different qualities I drew on through the project: Earth (embodied presence and participation in practical activities), Water (emotional perception and reflective clarity), Fire (the heart – purpose and care), Air (analysis and clear language), and Space (openness and intuition). The model is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and different researchers will find different mixes that serve them best.

This model first emerged in my analysis of ‘community’ in community-led housing, where I used the five-elements framing to describe how community is grounded, felt, enacted, articulated, and imagined, with the longer-term aim of developing a shared language and toolkit that can support community practice and policy.

Turning that lens toward the researcher makes explicit how different ways of knowing shape what we can see and understand. In particular, the approach helps to: (1) attend to the body, place, and practical activity as sources of understanding; (2) notice and work with emotions and atmospheres that influence participation and interpretation; (3) hold values and commitments in view without letting them override evidence; (4) make language and categories clearer across multiple actors; and (5) allow periods of openness so that new patterns can emerge before being tested.

I suggest that this holistic stance supports more honest reflexivity, richer collaboration across roles and clearer analytic claims. Rather than offering a prescription, the presentation invites researchers to consider their own configuration of capacities and to experiment with small practices that fit their contexts.

Between Christmas 2023 and Easter 2024, three teen girls attempted suicide within our plantation community in Liberia. Sadly, one died, one was hospitalised for nine days, and the third was hospitalised for a few days. This qualitative study explored the questions everyone was asking within the community - what was driving teen girls to suicide and how could future suicides be prevented? A modified version of the Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach was used, what I’ve come to call PAR’PEL, which stands for Participatory Action Research & Participatory Experiential Learning. PAR’PEL like any other PAR approach follows the same cycle of identification of needs, deciding the best course of action & implementation of the best course of action; all of which were done in direct consultation and collaboration with community members. The main finding from the PAR part of the PAR’PEL project was that teens lacked the psychological know-how to tackle the difficulties they faced. The Participatory Experiential Learning part of PAR’TEL relied on evidence based theory, on what works in youth suicide prevention, to craft practical life application lessons. This was then integrated into our monthly youth Bible study such that each Bible study session covers a theme on mental well-being and/or suicide prevention directly. The Bible study club is run by a well known community member and myself. To achieve success in youth suicide prevention, our suicide prevention efforts ought to go beyond the therapy/hospital room (ie. curative action after the fact) and be engaged directly with teens within our communities (ie. preventive action). Therefore in this PAR’PEL project, emphasis is placed on active learning, specifically psycho-educational learning. This presentation then showcases how my modified PAR project, PAR’PEL, is being utilised as a tool to fight against youth suicide within my local community in Liberia, West Africa.