Current Research Projects

I am currently involved in research exploring:

• the development of an International Network for Everyday Creativity, with a focus on: Creative research methods, the home and placemaking, health and wellbeing, and arts, science and technology (funded by the AHRC Research Network Development Fund)
• the development of resources to support community organisations to carry out participatory and arts-based research with communities, in partnership with the Trust for Developing Communities (funded by the AHRC Impact Acceleration Fund)
• LGTBQI+ friendships and community support, with Rebecca Graber, Charlotte Wilcox and Kay Aranda. 

I am available for doctoral research supervision, and for research consultancy work, including full project evaluations and analysis of existing data sets.

Photo by Viiktoria Kryvonos

Doctoral Supervision

I am currently supervising:

• Elisabeth Pederson 'Cultivating Care-full Practices Policies: The Prefigurative Possibilities and Complexities of Urban Community Gardens'
• Gabriel Hoosain Khan 'Art, Resistance, and Healing: On the Potentials of Using the Creative Change Laboratory (CCoLAB) Among Queer Youth in Brighton'
• Michael O'Rourke 'How Can Expressive Writing Help Gay Men to Process Difficult Feelings About Their Gender Identity, Masculinity and Sexuality?'
• Julie Rae 'PTSD, Creative Writing and Multimedia Narrative'
• Ashley Austin.  '(Re)Constructing Narrative Identity: The lived experience of women diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder'
• Annie Whilby.  'Love in a Time of Crisis: Intimate Relationships, Sexuality and Desire in Early Psychosis and Recovery' 
• Laharee Mitra. 'Decolonial Praxis in Museum Learning'

Previous doctoral candidates I have supervised include:

• Rebecca Atkinson.  'The Effects of Rhythmic Speech Cueing and Melodic Intonation Therapy for Children with a Diagnosis of Childhood Dementia (Batten Disease)'
• Rebecca Winter, 'An exploration of the representation and perceptions of frailty in undergraduate medical education' (MD)
• Bruno De Oliviera, 'The impact of welfare reforms in the UK on homeless people: A stakeholders' perspective' 

Past Research

My previous research has focused on areas including:

• improving the visibility, take-up and impact of social prescribing programmes, with Coastal Creative consultancy and community partners
• evaluation of a programme using family and local history records with people who live with, or are at risk of, dementia, working with For The Record and Gloucestershire Archives
• arts inclusivity in economically-deprived areas
• using arts-based research and community arts interventions to challenge stigma around invisible illnesses 
• the neuropsychology and subjective experiences of metaphor production amongst visual artists and creative writers/poets (with colleagues at CRACKLE; funded by University of Gloucestershire)
• the lived experiences of people with dementia
• how arts-based research can combat stigma around dementia
• digital/online media, peer mentoring and poetry education in the context of youth slam and spoken word
• participant observation of Apples & Snakes' national youth slam/spoken word project, Shake the Dust.  Click here to read my thoughts about this.
• an evaluation of a poetry intervention (Try to Remember) for people with dementia
• the history of youth slam and spoken word in the U.K.
• an evaluation of Apples & Snakes' national youth slam project, WordCup 2010.  Click here to read this report.
• performance poets' accounts of why they perform
• gender differences in the uses of social media (led by Richard Joiner, University of Bath)
• how adult and youth poetry slam participants in the U.K. and U.S. construct narratives around slam and their identities as slam participants (PhD thesis, completed with no revisions in 2009 from University of Exeter.  Read more here)

Click on the Publications tab at the top of this page to find out more about the publications and presentations resulting from these research projects.