My research centres on creativity and the arts, with foci including: art therapy; arts interventions for health and well being; social prescribing; creativity and the lived experience of dementia; arts education; spoken word and poetry slam; art worlds/communities; arts inclusivity; everyday creativity; and the artistic process.   

I am particularly interested the intersections between arts-based research, participatory research and social justice, and have developed the ‘collaborative poetics’ method framed by these concerns. I work with colleagues and students using creative, arts-based and/or participatory methods, including: poetic inquiry; autoethnography; photo voice; photo elicitation; collaborative poetics; and participatory action research. 

My doctoral students work on wide-ranging topics, with a shared focus on arts and wellbeing and/or art-based and creative research methods. I have also acted as an external examiner for a spectrum of work covering topics in these fields, including: spoken word with young offenders in a Macedonian prison; the experience of coming to know (and teach) creativity; arts-integrated approaches to engaging men in violence prevention; the performance and perception of authenticity in contemporary UK spoken word poetry; NHS workers’ everyday lives, emotions and traumas ; and experiences of the body and embodiment amongst counselling professionals.

You can find out more about my research and publications on my Orcid profile.

Current Research Projects

My current research includes:

• Developing an inclusive and accessible resource pack to support community-engaged research and policy development, with the Trust for Developing Communities (funded by the University of Brighton Policy Support Fund) 
• LGTBQ+ gambling harms, with Laetitia Zeeman, Alexandra Sawyer and Nigel Sherriff, and partners from YouGov and Brighton and Hove LGBT Switchboard (funded by GambleAware)
• Theatre as a school-based intervention to tackle substance misuse, with David Bishop (East Sussex County Council), JÖrg Huber (Brighton and Sussex Medical School), Alexandra Sawyer (University of Brighton), Nigel Sherriff (UoB), Michael Jopling (UoB), Richard de Visser (BSMS), Lindsey Forbes (University of Kent) and Unity Insights (funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research) 
• The use of the arts to support young people living with Long Covid, with Marija Pantelic (Brighton and Sussex Medical School), funded by the University of Brighton’s Ignite programme.

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

Past Research

My previous research projects include:

• Developing a model and resources to support community-engaged research, with the Trust for Developing Communities, including a resource pack available here.
• 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)
• 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)
• 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
• 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)

Doctoral Supervision

I am currently supervising:

• Martia Bevan, ‘HiStory in Her Eyes? Surviving Beyond Domestic Abuse as a Visually Impaired Woman’ (South Coast Doctoral Partnership funded)
• Elisabeth Pederson, ‘Cultivating Care-full Practices Policies: The Prefigurative Possibilities and Complexities of Urban Community Gardens’ (South Coast Doctoral Partnership funded; lead supervisor)
• Gabriel Hoosain Khan, ‘Art, Resistance, and Healing: On the Potentials of Using the Creative Change Laboratory (CCoLAB) Among Queer Youth in Brighton’ (techne funded; lead supervisor)
• 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’
• Annie Whilby, ‘Love in a Time of Crisis: Intimate Relationships, Sexuality and Desire in Early Psychosis and Recovery’ (University of Brighton funded)
• Laharee Mitra, ‘Decolonial Praxis in Museum Learning’ (techne funded)
• Tom Roberts, ‘Valuing Co-production in Mental Health: Exploring Comics as a Form of Arts-based Collaborative Practice’

Previous doctoral candidates I have supervised include:

• Dr Ashley Austin, ‘(Re)Constructing Narrative Identity: The lived experience of women diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder’ (lead supervisor)
• Dr Rebecca Atkinson,  ‘The Effects of Rhythmic Speech Cueing and Melodic Intonation Therapy for Children with a Diagnosis of Childhood Dementia (Batten Disease)’ (techne funded; lead supervisor)
• Dr Rebecca Winter, ‘An exploration of the representation and perceptions of frailty in undergraduate medical education’ (MD) 
• Dr Bruno De Oliviera, ‘The impact of welfare reforms in the UK on homeless people: A stakeholders’ perspective’