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.

Core aspects of my substantive academic interests in emotion, embodiment mental illness and pain overlap with other  research fields across social science, medicine and humanities. This dialogue is reflected in developing applied research which is concerned with understanding models of health and illness in contemporary healthcare with a core focus on explaining and transcending the often unhelpful polarisations between 'the natural' and 'the social', biological and cultural, art and science. My research has contributed to policy and practice in fields of chronic pain and ‘contested’ illness conditions; mental health and emotional wellbeing; health promotion and lay concepts of health and illness.

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.

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.

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 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

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. 

Her current research includes:

• The development and application of a collaborative poetics resource pack (funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation)
• The evaluation of community arts interventions with people who live with chronic, invisible illnesses (in collaboration with community theatre organisation, Root Experience)
• 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)
• The impact of austerity policies on homeless people

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.

Our research explores the intersections between gender, sexuality and health where social determinants such as heteronormativity, minority stress and discrimination may contribute to health and healthcare inequalities of LGBTQ+ 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 to 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 plurality.