Making meaning in muddy waters: representing complexity through community based storytelling

Internationally, storytelling has been used with many diverse communities. This paper compares the use of storytelling as a participatory art form within a community development project and a community and healthy living centre in the United Kingdom. Both the project and the centre regard storytelling activities as ‘inclusionary’ forms of intervention. However, the discourse of social inclusion rarely acknowledges the subtle psychosocial processes that are involved in participatory storytelling. This paper discusses such processes and examines some methodological implications of researching storytelling. It asks what contribution storytelling can make towards authentic representation of individual and community voices

Thinking from Experience in Psychosocial Practice: Reclaiming and Teaching ‘Use of Self’

A course based on psychosocial theory and students' experiences in practice has been taught in the UK, Norway and Quebec. It departs from the classical social work concept ‘use of self’ and aims to help novices in health and social work to understand how the social world is internalised and re-produced and the value of thinking from experience. International developments such as, competency-based education, New Public Management and evidence-based practice reduce opportunities for experiential learning. This trend has been exacerbated by a focus on anti-oppressive practice without a corresponding understanding of how oppressive relations are internalized and enacted by defended and conflicted subjects. Attempts to rectify a relational deficit through traditions of reflective practice and critical reflection are important developments, but could be further strengthened by psychosocial and psychodynamic perspectives. The course combines critical, contextual and relational thinking for students in caring profession

Field Work Reflections: Journeys in Knowing and Not-Knowing

In this paper, I retrace my interest in narrative forms of inquiry. I begin by revisiting a series of research projects that I conducted early in my career, describing some of my own dissatisfactions with the methods I used at the time. I move on to a detailed reexamination of my first piece of narrative research, completed during my PhD. In that project I used a narrative pointed psychosocial method in an attempt to develop new knowledge in the field of drugs, ‘race’ and ethnicity. In the final section, I consider what I have learned from this approach in terms of knowing and not-knowing and how I have used this experience to explore different approaches to narrative inquiry. I finish by drawing out some lessons I have learned from these different studies, which I hope might be of relevance to other social work researchers

The work of the audience: visual matrix methodology in museums

Visual matrix methodology has been designed for researching cultural imaginaries. It is an image-led, group-based method that creates a “third space” research setting to observe audience groups re-enacting lived experience of an event or process that takes place in the third space of a cultural setting. In this article the method is described through its use in relation to an art-science exhibition, Human + Future of the species, where three audience groups with investments in technology worked with exhibition material to achieve a complex, ambivalent state of mind regarding technological futures. The visual matrix has been designed to capture the affective and aesthetic quality of audience engagement in third space by showing what audiences do with what is presented to them. We argue that such methodologies are useful for museums as they grapple with their role as sites where citizens not only engage in dialogue with one another but actively re-work their imaginaries of the future

Psychosocial aesthetics and the art of lived experience

This paper identifies the distinctive nature of arts-based psychosocial enquiry and practice in a public mental health context, focusing on two projects delivered as part of The Big Anxiety festival (Sydney, 2017): Awkward Conversations, in which one-to-one conversations about anxiety and mental health were offered in experimental aesthetic formats; and Parragirls Past, Present, a reparative project, culminating in an immersive film production that explores the enduring effects of institutional abuse and trauma and the ways in which traumatic experiences can be re-figured to transform their emotional resonance and meaning. Bringing an arts-based enquiry into lived experience into dialogue with psychosocial theory, it examines the transformative potential of aesthetic transactions and facilitating environments, specifically with regard to understanding the imbrication of lived experience and social settings

Five Ways to Wellbeing: holistic narratives of public health programme participants

This paper reports on a study which formed part of a qualitative process evaluation of a wellbeing programme in North West England. The study used the biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) to undertake and analyse data from interviews with six participants from diverse projects within the programme. This generated rich case studies and spotlighted cross-case commonalities, building understanding of how the programme achieved its effects. We present findings using the Five Ways to Wellbeing framework, presenting one abridged ‘case’ and summarising cross-cutting themes. We explore how BNIM gives insight into the psychosocial complexity of wellbeing, building understanding of its holistic and dynamic nature, and then highlight the flexibility, resonance and widespread appeal of Five Ways to Wellbeing. In concluding, we argue that by enabling participants to tell their own stories of participation in the different projects, we gain a more authentic understanding of the ‘whole’ story of how involvement has affected wellbeing. Such approaches are crucial as wellbeing becomes a central concept in global health policy and promotion

Object Relations in the Museum: A Psychosocial Perspective

This article theorises museum engagement from a psychosocial perspective. With the aid of selected concepts from object relations theory, it explains how the museum visitor can establish a personal relation to museum objects, making use of them as an ‘aesthetic third’ to symbolise experience. Since such objects are at the same time cultural resources, interacting with them helps the individual to feel part of a shared culture. The article elaborates an example drawn from a research project that aimed to make museum collections available to people with physical and mental health problems. It draws on the work of the British psychoanalysts Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to explain the salience of the concepts of object use, potential space, containment and reverie within a museum context. It also refers to the work of the contemporary psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas on how objects can become evocative for individuals both by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and by the way they are used to express personal idiom

Who Cares? Museums, Health and Wellbeing Research Project

This study by the Psychosocial Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire investigated a series of inventive Who Cares? projects across six museums, in order to discover how access to museum activities might affect health and wellbeing. The participating museums were part of the Renaissance in the Regions programme funded by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. A key conclusion is that the programme has revealed great potential. It has shown that collections can be made available to disadvantaged groups in ways that can improve wellbeing. The research took place over a period of two years (2009-2011) and followed the development and implementation of specific projects targeted at disadvantaged groups in each museum. A further key component was working with the Renaissance North West research manager and staff at participating museums on evaluation planning and feedback days at each museum. The purpose of this was to help develop the museums- self-evaluation capacity and to generate further data to feed into the research process. The research team analysed data collected by the museums as part of their evaluation. The thoughtful and self-reflective engagement of museum staff was vital in facilitating the research, and in seeing the individual projects through to their conclusion.div_PaSpub4726pu

Research encounters, reflexivity and supervision

Reflexivity in qualitative and ethnographic social science research can provide a rich source of data, especially regarding the affective, performative and relational aspects of interviews with research subjects. This paper explores by means of three case examples different ways of accessing and using such reflexivity. The examples are drawn from an empirical psycho-social study into the identity transitions of first-time mothers in an inner-city multicultural environment. Fieldnotes and supervision were used to engage with researcher subjectivity, to enhance the productive use of reflexivity and to address the emotional work of research. The methodology of the supervision was psychoanalytic, in its use of a boundaried frame and of psychoanalytic forms of noticing oneself, of staying engaged emotionally as well as creating a reflective distance. The examples illustrate how this can enhance the knowledge gained about the research subjects