This Knowledge Exchange Workshop invites anyone from across the Mobilising Community Assets Phase 3 projects who is working on, or interested in, creative and/or participatory methods to share their work.

The workshop will feature short talks from two of the projects who use innovative methods, to stimulate a creative discission about what methods are in use across the projects, what works well and why. The 90 minute session will be online and very informal, and will feature creative ways of exchanging information about creative methods in practice.

If you are unable to attend there will be plenty of other opportunities to share your work - on the day we will be using Mentimeter to gather and share information; this facility will also be available afterwards if you can't attend so please get in touch for further information.

If you have access requirements (e.g. BSL interpreter) please let us know.

Contact Rodney Reynolds from the MCA Tem at UCL: rodney.reynolds@ucl.ac.uk

Our two speakers will be Marisa De Andrade and Becca Waterson. Read on for more information about what they will cover in their short talks:

Becca Waterson will discuss the bodymapping approach used in the CHOICE project

CHOICE seeks to improve the lives of people living with long-term mental health problems by tackling the fundamental health and social inequalities they experience. We aim to end the avoidable loneliness, discrimination, and poor health that many people with severe mental illness face. We will do this by opening access to the widest range of community assets – places, resources, and facilities that most people take for granted.

We use bodymapping as a way to understand experiences of living in our society with severe mental illness. This approach allows participants to explore and express embodied ways they feel excluded and feel distressed, which are often difficult to communicate.

In this session, I will describe our use of bodymapping in the CHOICE project, and how it is being used to engage and shape political will (in traditional political institutions, organisations, as well as society more generally) to affect change , enabling those living with severe mental illness to exercise their full humanity.'

Razze, Dazzle, Baffle! The Principles of Creative Methodologies as the Practice of Verification. Marisa de Andrade from REALITIES

How can creative and participatory methodologies open new ways of thinking about reality, knowledge, data, evidence and meaning-making? How might hyperrealism, magical realism and immersive, experiential datasets help us tackle health disparities and other complex issues of our time? Also, how does ethics fit into all of it? Join Marisa de Andrade from REALITIES as she uses grounded, hyper-local, place-based examples of arts-informed methods ranging from rock and mural painting to drama workshops and storytelling; podcasting to dreamcatcher-making as applied in five geographical community hubs across Scotland with people who have first-hand experience of trauma, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, displacement, poor mental health or imprisonment. Why do these approaches matter and how they can serve as entry-points into understanding more about our diverse realities and lived experiences in so-called ‘broken systems’? We’ll reflect on how creative methodologies have eruptive power in Research-Practice-Policy Partnerships to transform systems from the inside-out.

Knowledge Exchange Workshop: Creative and Participatory Methodologies