Arts and health
About
Arts and Health focuses on the ways in which creative practice can contribute to enhancing wellbeing and to recovery from exposure to traumatic experience. Researchers employ a health humanities approach to engage with individuals, communities and health professionals.
We aim to pursue research and publication opportunities around our approach to creative arts and injury/illness where we focus on process, not content. This contrasts with the extensive body of psychological research on, for example, expressive writing where the content of the writing is prescribed and necessarily involves participants recounting traumatic experiences. Participants with whom we work may choose to creatively work with past trauma or may choose to work with seemingly neutral content—the value is in imagining themselves as a person practicing new skills and thereby seeing themselves as more than an injured or ill person.
In other words, we use creative arts in ways which seek to overcome the 'deficit' focus on people with injury or illness, particularly in how individuals see themselves. We seek to build quantitative and qualitative evidence of the efficacy of that approach for transition—transition out of organisations, transition to new roles within organisations, back into working life after trauma and prevention of trauma.
The Arts for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills (ARRTS) program is a biannual, month-long arts practice residency program targeted at current and recent ADF and first responder personnel. Run in partnership with the Department of Defence, it allows participants the opportunity to build an active arts practice in creative writing, visual arts or music as a key strategy in assisting their recovery from service-related trauma. It provides mentoring staff with the opportunity to research and develop best practice approaches, strategies and curricula in the space of Arts/Health and Arts led recovery.
Media
Regeneration was a collaborative response to complex traumas experienced by Australia’s rural communities from drought and bushfires to COVID-19. This project was funded by The Hospital Research Foundation with funds raised by the Magwill Foundation – the charitable entity of Magda Szubanski and Will Connolly.
Funding
The Hospital Research Foundation
Partners
LivingWorks, Phoenix Australia, Military and Emergency Services Health Australia.
Media
The project explores the meeting of Indigenous Australian story practices with the teaching of creative writing, and how this meeting can be used both to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and to lift cultural competency across the university community. To do this, the project entwines creative and traditional research with teaching and community outreach. As well as connecting First Nations community members with the university through on-campus workshops, it provides a research basis for the integration of Indigenous Australian content and epistemology in mainstream creative writing classes. It supports the development of new Indigenous Australian writers, funds the creation of new works and investigates best practices for teaching creative writing to both mainstream and Indigenous Australian cohorts.
From 2017–2019 this project is funded by a grant from the Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Commonwealth Department of Communications and the Arts. The project team will host visiting Indigenous Australian writers across the grant period, including for a national symposium on April 6, 2018. A first paper emerging from the research was published in TEXT Journal, November 2017.
Project Team
Dr Jennifer Crawford , Dr Paul Collis, Ms Lisa Fuller, Associate Professor Jordan Williams
Mr Ian Drayton is an ex-serving member of the Royal Australian Army and remains deeply interested in military history and culture. He holds a Bachelor of Business and a Master of Tertiary Education Management and through his position as a Faculty General Manager at the º¬Ðß²ÝÊÓƵ and has been able to implement what has become a formal five-year creative arts project with the Department of Defence.
Ian Drayton was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study the application of creative arts in the rehabilitation and recovery of wounded, injured & ill Defence personnel suffering combat-related PTSD. The project aimed to benchmark similar programs in the UK and USA to further existing recovery strategies of the Australian Defence Force. You can download Ian's final report for the Churchill Fellowship here.
Our research focuses on the role of narration and story as sense making and situation awareness in industry contexts and simulated training environments. Industry collaborators have included the Royal Adelaide Hospital (Adelaide), CAE, Calvary Hospital (Canberra) and the Defence Department, Australian Army.
Publications
'Narrative Dramaturgy and Sense-Making in Healthcare Simulation' in Nestel D, Bearman M. (Eds) (2015) Healthcare Simulation Education: Evidence, Theory and Practice. West Sussex; Willey Blackwell.
Led by
Centenary Professor Ross Gibson, Dr Teresa Crea
Promoting Unity and Harmony Among the South Sudanese Australians Research Project
The Promotion of Unity and Harmony among the South Sudanese Community in Australia through Pathways of Resilience aims to investigate the impact of the current conflict in S. Sudan on South Sudanese Australians and identify pathways for promoting harmony.
Investigators
Dr Nawal El-Gack, Dr Judy Hemming ,Gabriel Yak
Funding
Department of Social Services
Contact us
Centre for Creative and Cultural Research
11 Kirinari Street
Bruce ACT 2617
cccr@canberra.edu.au
Higher Degree by Research enquiries:
artsanddesignhdr@canberra.edu.au