Creative health
Led by Professor Renee Timmers, we are exploring the intersection of arts and humanities with health and wellbeing. We investigate the role of language and cultural context in enabling or inhibiting access to health promotion.
Language use and opportunities for creative expression can play a key role in the promotion or inhibition of health and wellbeing. We research what is required for creative activities to be inclusive, accessible and health promoting, whilst also critically examining the language used (verbal and non-verbal communication) in health settings.
Creative activities are highly adaptable and flexible, which means they can in principle be adjusted to suit the needs of people of different ages, creative arts ability and interests, and with different health conditions. However, little is known about how such adaptations are made in practice and how creative participation can be shaped to be health promoting for various groups. Whilst evidence is growing that participation in creative activities does indeed support wellbeing of the people involved, much of the evidence remains small-scale and restricted to particular contexts and population groups. Moreover, creative interventions are often examined without considering the particular properties or active ingredients playing a role in delivering reported beneficial effects. This includes the use of verbal and non-verbal communication in enabling or inhibiting access to health promotion, whether in creative health contexts or health settings more broadly.
This workstream consists of a number of projects that examine different aspects of the overarching challenges. This includes for example the development of music technology to promote access to musical participation for people with dementia; working with South Yorkshire council, health board, and creative practitioners to strengthen practices and support for creative health in the region; advancing knowledge exchange between the arts and medical worlds to support people with long terms health conditions, and critical analyses of medical language directed at the general public, such as in mother and infant care. We come together in knowledge exchange events and project or workstream meetings to strengthen the interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge base as well as the impact of the work.
Central to this workstream are interdisciplinary methodologies that combine arts and humanities based techniques with methods from social, psychological and computational sciences. Characteristic of our work is the employment of participatory research methods, collaborating from an early phase of the projects with relevant stakeholders, and video based methods, analysing verbal and non-verbal behaviours from video footage of creative workshops, as well as other approaches that include the development of technology and the use of AI, multi-site collaborations with researchers and participants overseas, fieldwork, and practice-based development in the form of action research and arts-based methods.
Dr Nicole Baumgarten - Languages and Cultures
Dr Justin Christensen - Music
Emily Cooper - Music
Dr Jules Holroyd - Philosophy
Dr Ning Ma - Computer Science
Dr Jennifer MacRitchie - Music
Dr Christian Morgner - Management
Michael Neokleous - Music
Dr Rebecca Ogden Languages and Cultures
Professor Renee Timmers - Music
Dr Sara Whiteley - English