Who we are

Ross Adamson is a researcher and practitioner in documentary filmmaking and digital storytelling. He is currently completing his Doctorate in Education at Bournemouth University on Ethics and Documentary Filmmaking Encounters.  He has collaborated on several digital storytelling projects (AHRC and EU funding).  He publishes research on auto/biography, documentary filmmaking and digital storytelling.

Josh Cameron's research interests are: mental health recovery; mental health and employment; meaningful work; and, resilience (especially where resilience is understood in a non-individualising systemic way). These are informed by an occupational and social justice perspective aimed at addressing health and wider inequalities. His research activity has involved a significant degree of collaboration with community/service user/'lived experience' expertise and with practitioners. Methodologically Josh approaches research from a critical realist position orientated to gaining explanatory insight into real world phenomena. He has most experience in using qualitative methods but has also adopted mixed methods approaches in some projects.

Recent projects include the Economic and Social Research Council funded Imagine Project - The social, historical, cultural and democratic context of civic engagement: imagining different communities and making them happen. In this Josh collaborated with ‘lived experience’ peer trainers from the Sussex Recovery College and occupational therapists from the Sussex Partnership Mental Health Trust to co-design, deliver and evaluate a ‘Building Resilience for Wellness and Recovery’ course for people facing mental health challenges.

He is currently leading, with his colleague Suna Eryigit-Madzwamuse, the research evaluation of the Big Lottery funded Headstart Blackpool 'Resilience Revolution' This programme supports the mental health of children and young people in Blackpool using a community development approach that embeds Resilient Therapy methods across the town. The programme draws on both resilience and systems theory to work alongside practitioners, carers, parents and young people to build a more resilience-based way of working using a common language. Josh and colleagues have collaborated with Beverley and Etienne Wenger-Trayner to use their Value Creation Framework to support the mixed methods evaluation of this project.

Theoretically, I am interested in understanding the architecture and nature of Self—Other dialectic as a key dynamic of human social life, the mould of communication, and the basis of social knowledge. In this regard, my work makes use of, and contributes to, the frameworks of social representation theory, symbolic interactionism, and the dialogical thesis of human mind.

I use this framework to guide my work on social inequalities and disadvantages. I am interested in exploring how the meanings of social problems develop, how societal discourses shape our understanding and response to them, and how the Self—Other dialectic inform all this at interpersonal and collective levels. I have applied this framework in my research on British and Indian mass media and ethnographic poverty research in India.

With its focus on understanding racism and prejudice in India, I am developing a project that examines the relationship between the cognitive processing of surface level information and the Othering of individuals and social groups.

Themes and issues that I'm interested in include:

Public understanding of scienceInteraction between science and common sensePoverty, deprivation, and social exclusionIdentities: particularly ethnic and racial identitiesVaccine hesitancy

My background is in the field of Social Psychology and my own research involves the study of groups, falling into two main areas: crowd behaviour and collective resilience.

My main body of interest is explaining how people behave in crowds and I am part of a group of Social Psychologists who seem to spend a lot of their time overcoming the classic myths associated with collectives, as crowds often behave much better than they are usually given credit for! My own particular area of interest is mass emergency behaviour and how this influences disaster planning and response guidelines. What we are increasingly finding is that communities affected by emergencies are often much more resilient to adversity than was previously expected, and this has profound implications for emergency policy and planning.

Following on from this, I am also interested in looking at how people can come together if they have a shared experience of adversity, and how this collective resilience might also help mitigate the effects of exposure to stress. I have explored the emergence of collective resilience in a variety of diverse groups, such as nurses, paramedics, and young people dealing with the everyday stresses of growing up.

I have 22 years experience of working within child and adolescent mental health services as a mental health nurse and clinical nurse specialist. My work is influenced by consideration of the therapeutic milieu, family and wider systems, relational, creative, cognitive and behavioural therapies. I am curious as to what is happening at the intersections of children and young peoples lives and the contribution that this has towards a culture within which  good mental health,  emotional wellbeing and social justice are held as important.  Consequently, I am interetsed in research that uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods of enquiry to understand interactions between social mechanisms, expressions of mental health, resilience and social justice.

My research predominantly focuses on the political and social role of football fans. This includes the positive affect fans can have in challenging discrimination in football, and helping local communities and refugees. This invariably brings fans into conflict with the various regulatory bodies, such as football federations, governments and the police. Understanding the wider political economy of football helps situate these conflicts in their wider context.

Natalie combines epidemiological methods for health services research with a critical approach and qualitative methods. Her interests include the interface between sexual and reproductive health wiith psychosocial issues, public health, community delivery of sexual health interventions, problematic substance use and anti-microbial resistance (AMR). Methodologically she is interested in clinical prediction modelling, development and evaluation of complex interventions, the evaluation of public involvement in research, and researching disenfranchised populations. Natalie has been developing a critical epidemiology approach to sexual health research and more recently resilience and trauma informed research practices. 

I am a social and health psychologist with interests in health and well-being and how identity processes are related to these. My research focuses, firstly, on health behaviour change and, secondly, on reducing inequality in educational settings through interventions known to reduce stereotype threat.

My research interests include:

Applying self-affirmation theory as an intervention in healthNarrative health informationIdentity-related process in understanding stereotype threatApplying self-affirmation theory to buffer against stereotype threatCommunity-led researchHealth and educational inequality

Engaging Design and Making Research:

Designed products, spaces, services and systems pervade every part of our lives. The world is awash with ‘stuff’ that has been designed - Design has ‘made it’. However in times of ecological crisis, environmental pollution, social and political uncertainty and economic disparity design stands simultaneously as both disease and cure. 

I am interested in how designing and making contributes to positive, public persuasion, sustainable storytelling, ethical engagement, culture shift and behaviour change beyond delivering the next iteration of homogenous mobile phone. Design has agency and is being engaged as a tool and means to address issues of our time. Moreover design is about engagement – through potent, product propaganda, meaningful, material messaging and critical, craft campaigns, designers and makers are utilising the powerful language of materials, objects and products and the ubiquity of services and systems to change behaviour, provoke protest and empower people.

Material matters and making matters. Through the prism of waste we explore both the behaviour of matter and matters of behaviour. Sustainability is both a social and a material issue and waste is a result of what we think and feel as well as what we do.

Designers and makers of diverse types are dispensing with disciplinary traditions and forming new alliances, promoting civic engagement, mass participation, creating tools for accessible exploitation, activism and more virtuous circular economies. Methods of material manipulation, subversion, techno-crafting and open-sourcing. Some of our most pressing issues have re-awakened design with the critical concern and purpose that once defined it and designers and makers can turn these issues into opportunities for positive intervention, ethical economic development more symbiotically with our eco-system.

My research interests lie in seeking to bridge the disjuncture between climate change science, water resources management practice and local articulations and experiences of changing water environments. My work is critically engaged with understanding how developed economies organize and manage their freshwater resources with regards to transitioning towards sustainable futures in the context of climate change. At heart my research explores why climate change narratives are still failing to resonate with most citizens, and are still not embedded within organisational praxis, and seeks to determine what approaches may close these gaps in order to support transitions towards sustainable futures. Inherent to this line of questioning are explorations of emergent forms of citizenship, discourses of governance and the links between landscape, taskscape and community within the late capitalist era. I draw on the work of Karen Bakker, Noel Castree, Eric Swyngedouw, Neil Adger and Tim Ingold to undertake empirical qualitative fieldwork which interrogates the political, cultural and physical intersections which co-create our sense of place, and our intimate, immediate relationship with our water environments

My work centres on how peer relationships can contribute to the development of psychological resilience in the face of complex challenges to mental health and wellbeing, with a particular orientation to lived experience. My research aims to identify, understand and promote the contributions of informal social relationships and practices, especially as these arise in resistance to or as consequence of broad social risks (such as austerity, poverty, stigma, discrimination, colonial legacy, and prevalence of harmful substances). While this may sound grim, my work consistently engages with the strength, humour, support and lightheartedness that can be wrought through social connection.

While I am very much a (critical) psychologist, I believe that successfully engagement with the meanings, opportunities and adaptive benefits of social connection often requires thoughtful inter- and multi-discipinary perspective. For example, my current research involves working with colleagues in public health, media studies, and rehabilitation services. This ESRC/AHRC funded GCRF project is in collaboration with the University of Leeds, Mind India, NIRMAAN Rehabilitation Institute and the Hope Foundation, and uses participatory photography and filmmaking to explore resistance and resilience to problematic substance use among young people in Assam, India. Previously I collaborated with the Overseas Development Institute to draw lessons on psychological resilience for practitioners and researchers working in climate change and humanitarian disaster response. I have also worked with a counselling psychologist to explore the lived experience of peer support in a queer community pub.

I have worked with adults, young people and adolescents facing challenges from alcohol and substance use, socioeconomic vulnerability, and discrimination based on their LGBTQIA+ identity. I primarily use qualitative methods these days, including descriptive and interpretive phenomenological analysis, thematic analysis, and visual methods, but I use non-experimental quantitative methods, too. 

My work is interdisciplinary and I work closely with evidence bases and colleagues from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, community development, education, social work, psychiatry and nursing. All of my research is co-productive, and as the academic director of the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP) I have expertise in applying insights from research within the context of Communities of Practice (CoP). CoPs bring people with a shared passion together across, not only different agencies and disciplines, but also organisational forms and status boundaries, including service users and their carers. I am passionate about using research insights to inform practice developments and vice versa.

I have published widely on health and social care services to disadvantaged children, their families and their supporters, especially in relation to fostering and adoption to midwifery and health visiting and in relation to the concept of resilience. I have also published work on the development of community university partnership programmes. All of my work results in practical applications.

Public Policy, Comparative Policy, Complexity Theory, Dynamic Pattern Synthesis and Public Management

Dr Emmanuel Idowu has degrees in Practitioner Leadership, Human Resource Development, Healthcare Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine. As a researcher, he focuses on issues of organisation, performance, leadership and healthcare ethics. Currently, Dr Emmanuel Idowu research examines organisational culture theory and the determinants of workplace performance in the healthcare organisation. In particular, he's interested in the implications and applications of these determinants in organisational behaviour and performance. Emmanuel is also interested in the theme of the ‘dominant organisational logic’ as a means of understanding the relationship between organisational culture and organisational performance.

Helen Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology specialising in arts-based research methods, creativity, and critical community psychology.

Helen is both a social scientist and a spoken word poet, and combines these interests under the auspices of arts-based research. She is the founder of the collaborative poetics method and network, which use participatory, arts-based research to explore/communicate the lived experiences of communities and individuals, with a view to supporting their critical resilience. Helen heads the Creative Methodologies strand in the Centre of Arts and Well Being.

Her current research includes:

Participatory, arts-based research exploring inequalities in access to the arts amongst economically-deprived communities (using the collaborative poetics method).The lived experiences of people with chronic, contested invisible illnesses The evaluation of an intervention using family and local history records with people who live with or are at risk of dementia (in collaboartion with For The Record and Gloucestershire Archives) 

Nita`s research interests are associated with her professional context of Nursing and more recently in work-placed learning pedagogies.  She is interested in researching the learning about, through and at work with a particular focus on how this is positioned by the individual who is bounded by the workplace.  Her Professional Doctorate in Education completed at the University of Southampton identified the dualism of Social Capital in sustaining the practice and work-related learning of Nurse within an unfunded European Nurse Education Network.  Her research in her MSc Community Nursing awarded from London Southbank University explored Clinical Decision making in District Nurses and her research from her first degree awarded from Kings College, London explored role transistion in junior sisters.

She is currently consolidating this research through publication of her findings, dissemination and exploring how creating social capital can enable learning and sustain practice for participants within a work setting alongside developing both novice educators and student belonging to the nursing profession.    An impact output has been achieving with colleagues a small grant from the Centre for Learning and Teaching grant to develop a resilience building initiative in curriculum design for the pre-registration Nursing Programme (2018 – 2019).   Nita is currently working with a research team from the University of Calgary on phase II of an international study exploring how to prepare Undergraduate Nursing Students to Recognize the Deteriorating Patient.

My research interests are driven strongly by a social justice agenda, along with a desire for research to be collaborative and participatory with demonstrative social impact which ultimately tackles disadvantage and inequalities in health.

I am interested in all areas of research relating to public health and health promotion theory, policy, and practice, especially with an international/global focus. Areas of specific interest and expertise relate to three key areas:

Sexual health and HIVHealth inequalitiesParenting (including fatherhood, breastfeeding, and young parents).

Current research projects:

Exploring a whole-system intervention to improve mental health and wellbeing in schools.Evaluation of Care Navigation as part of the Right Person First initiative (CANE - Care Navigation Evaluation).WHO ProSPeRero: Project on Sexually Transmitted Infection Point-of-care Testin - Clinic based evaluation of SD BIOLINE HIV/Syphilis Duo (Alere) and DPP® HIV-Syphilis Assay (Chembio) for the screening of HIV and syphilis in men who have sex with men in the STI screening facilities of Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom (UK).ESTICOM: European Surveys & Trainings to Improve MSM Community Health project. European Commission. Lead for WP6 (ECHOES Survey).Health4LGBTI: reducing health inequalities experienced by LGBTI people. European Commission. Lead for WP1 & WP2Engaging fathers to support breastfeeding

Previous research projects:

European/International:

HEPCOM:Preventing obesity among children and young people.Everywhere in Japan: HIV prevention for Men who have Sex with MenSIALON II: Capacity building in combining targeted prevention with meaningful HIV surveillance among men who have sex with menSODEMIFA: Addressing the social determinants of health: Multilevel governance of policies aimed at families with childrDAIWA: A feasibility study to explore the European Everywhere framework in JapanACTION-FOR-HEALTH: Reducing health inequalities - preparation for action plans and structural funds projectsGRADIENT: Tackling the Gradient - applying public health policies to effectively reduce health inequalities amongst families and childrenH-CUBE: HBV-HCV-HIV- Three different and serious threats for European young people. A network to study and face these challenges in the EUEVERYWHERE Project: A European multi-sectoral network for the prevention of HIV/AIDS for men having sex with menTEP: Health Promotion International – Transatlantic Exchange Partnership: EU-CanadaECHIM European Community Health Indicator Monitoring ProjectCEIHPAL Canadian-European Initiative for Health Promotion Advanced Learning: EU-CanadaPHETICE: Public Health Education and Training in an Enlarging EuropeDETERMINE: EU Consortium for action on the socio-economic determinants of HealthENGENDER: Inventory of good practices in Europe for promoting gender equity in health

Local/national:

FuelPre (Fuel Poverty Reduction Evaluation). Evaluation of the NHS Hastings & Rother Clinical Commissing Group Healthy Homes Programme.Evaluation of the Education, Training, Volunteering & Employment (ETVE) Project for People Living with HIV (PLWHIV).Older people living with HIV in residential care homes. Extension to the Education, Training, Volunteering & Employment (ETVE) project.A better understanding what makes for effective conversations about alcohol between parents & their 15-17 year olds. Drinkware.Healthy Hastings & Rother Programme: Developing an evaluation methodology. Hastings & Rother CCG.Engagement with young people to inform health improvement commissioning for children, families and schools in East SussexAnalysis of the Better Beginnings consultation in East SussexEngaging and supporting fathers to promote breastfeeding: A concept analysisAn evaluation of services for young people in East Sussex: FE nurse provision at schools and colleges, pulse innov8, and the young men’s health worker serviceThe perspectives of fathers on the development of a breastfeeding support packUnderstanding the service needs of routine and manual smokers working on building sites in Tower HamletsFathers’ views on breastfeeding in Brighton and HoveThe Sussex LGBTU Training and Development Research PartnershipThe West Sussex LGBTU Youth Research Project and LGBTU Launch EventReview of Brighton and Hove WHO Phase IV Healthy City ProgrammeThe effectiveness of an innovative digital-Story intervention aimed at reducing binge drinking among young peopleEvaluation of fpa’s ‘Speakeasy’ course for parentsSupporting young fathers: examples of promising practicePromoting health and emotional wellbeing: accredited training for supported housing staff working with young peopleCommunication and supervision about alcohol in familiesDeterminants of sport and physical activity amongst young women: a secondary analysisEvaluation of the community sport and enhanced PESSCL pilot programme,Speakeasy parenting fund evaluation: supporting professionals working with young people around sex and relationships

  Social inequality and mental distressCritical community psychologyInformal therapeutic spaces and settingsStatactivism and academic activismMulti-stakeholder capacity building action-research in communitiesCare and young people with complex needs

Spanning fifteen years, Julia Winckler's research sits across multiple strands:

• Archives, Memory & Migration

• Reactivating Archives through Artistic Interventions

• Photography and Pedagogy

Julia's research investigates archival traces within the context of collective memory and migration narratives. Her key research question probes how neglected archival sources can reveal forgotten histories of great significance to our understanding of the present. Applying a creative and interpretive photographic approach, using photographs as tools to think about historical experience, multiple articulations of memory and meaning are expressed, with the aim of generating new academic knowledge.

The author Ben Okri has described 'the artist [as] a conduit through which lost things are recovered' (2005). Julia's research methodology considers archival research as a material, embodied practice. Through extensive investigation in archives, she gathers materials and maps out a strategy and approach. She then travels to the sites that have historical significance for each project.

Through reactivation and visualisation using photography as the key medium, past memories are reframed and resituated in the present. Combining an archaeological with a genealogical approach, traces are  documented; their significance to the present assessed, as some of the historical functions are lost or no longer important. The genealogical approach necessitates an investigation that starts in the present, a retracing of the journey, that is physical and experimental, setting up encounters and dialogues.

Lost and recovered narratives have been a key theme of Julia Winckler's work to date. Memory and migration narratives of emigration (Two Sisters), exile and loss (Traces), exploration (Retracing Heinrich Barth), displacement (Leaving Atlantis), expedition/peregrination (My Canadian Pilgrimage) and interwar home-making (Fabricating Lureland)  have been visualized and probed using the language of photography. These projects have been disseminated through public exhibitions, at conferences, exhibition catalogue publications and public engagement workshops, as well as informing Julia's teaching practice.

Julia has undertaken extensive work with and within communities to enable broader access to personal cultural heritage amongst disadvantaged areas and demographics. She has sought to improve inclusivity of knowledge production and to reanimate disconnected or underdeveloped narratives and histories. Oscillating between photographic and archival research, she uses photography as a medium through which collective memories can be reconstructed and given a renewed cultural presence.

Dr Laetitia Zeeman undertook research that evolved from health practice via critical discourse analysis to explore identity formation and the discursive construction of gender, including the patriarchal discourse in post-apartheid South Africa. This work questioned normative formations of gender and made visible how change occurs in the margins, where gender expression and the related relational practices of women moved beyond binary gender towards plurality.

Health4LGBTI

Her more recent research with Prof Nigel Sherriff for the European Commission "Health4LGBTI: Reducing health inequalities experienced by LGBTI people" explores the impact of social determinants on the health and healthcare inequalities of LGBT+ people. The political aim of this work is to address the causes of inequalities underpinning the adversity experienced by minority groups. This research considers how barriers can be overcome by health professionals when providing care for LGBT+ people, and how to address the obstacles LGBT+ people face when accessing healthcare. The output informs health service development and delivery for those who lead non-normative lives by acknowledging gender and sexual multiplicity. The research included developing a training programme for health professionals to address the specific health needs of LGBT+ people. This programme has been used widely in health settings to inform medical and nursing curricula, as well as offering training for health professionals.

Further research included a critique of discourses that shape contemporary mental health practice with the introduction of innovative roles such as the mental health practitioner role in the UK. This initiative was designed to address workforce shortages in mental health practice.