Creativity and Wellbeing

This project includes a collaborative team from education, theatre and performance and feminist and cultural studies. Building on pilot research in criminology, it looks at how theatre and interdisciplinary research can improve the wellbeing of young people in a climate of widespread violence against women.

• The project will use a research-creation approach to examine how the play ‘Othello on Trial’:
• deploys theatre-based techniques that acknowledge diversity in the classroom
• queries assumptions about Shakespeare’s universality and colour-blindness.

The project will include performances informed by the research team’s collective practice and a symposium for invited stakeholders in the Victorian education sector. These events will help assess the project’s potential for inclusion in school-based curricula, and show the valuable contribution theatre can make to young people’s creativity, critical thinking and wellbeing.

Resulting research data and resources will form a digital study to ensure the project’s longevity. This can be used by schools and policymakers in Australia and internationally.

Team

Kathryn Coleman (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Adrian Howe (Arts), Lauren Rosewarne (Arts), Scott Welsh (Victoria University), Richard Sallis (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Sarah Truman (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Sarah Healy (Melbourne Graduate School of Education).

Contact: Dr Kathryn Coleman, Coordinating Investigator at kathryn.coleman@unimelb.edu.au

Recent devastating floods, drought, and bushfires in Australia have had a profound impact on children and young people living in disaster affected communities, where they are dealing with the effects of family stress, displacement, trauma, and loss.

Those outside disaster zones witnessing the crisis can also be susceptible to feelings of vicarious trauma. These factors, coupled with the growing global movement towards action on climate change, have led to an increase in 'eco-anxiety' or 'ecological grief' among children and young people. Many are witnessing the devastating effects of climate change and experiencing feelings of helplessness and despair.

This project examines the role of youth theatre and drama in responding to the multifaceted effects of this crisis.

Research shows that arts-based wellbeing interventions can positively impact young people's ability to:

• process their experiences following a disaster
• manage post-traumatic stress
• build social cohesion and self-confidence.

The arts can also play a valuable role in narrating the community's response to disaster, and in rallying strengths in moving towards recovery. Embodied artforms such as theatre and drama provide a collaborative, agentic experience where people can explore complex issues and emotions, and ideas for the future.

Working with grassroots practitioners and established youth theatre companies, the team will explore how theatre and drama can facilitate a sense of wellbeing and agency for children and young people. Both in direct approaches to post-disaster recovery, and in addressing eco-anxiety and ecological grief experienced on a societal level.

Team

Sarah Woodland (Fine Arts and Music), Helen Cahill (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Linda Hassall (Griffith University), Simon Rice (Orygen Centre for Youth Mental Health).

Partners: Fraser Corfield (Australian Theatre for Young People), Tiffany Vatcher and Jennifer South (Upstage Independent Theatre School).

Contact: Dr Sarah Woodland, Coordinating Investigator at sarah.woodland@unimelb.edu.au

Dance provides a way to experience interconnectedness and reclaim a sense of wellbeing by teaching us to acknowledge rather than avoid difficult emotions and uncomfortable movements. As our world becomes increasingly digitised, we need new practiced forms of expression that can help us navigate the emerging bodily, social and environmental challenges of being “always online”.

This creative project brings together a cognitive neuroscientist, a choreographer and a composer to explore how gesture, music and costume can respond to neuronal activity in the brain made visible by an electroencephalogram (EEG).

The EEG data will be translated into markers for change in frequency and gestural range by the dancer, and a test audience will be invited to experience the outcome: a dance performance and workshop which will challenge our thinking about technology, music, the body and the brain.

Team

Carol Brown (Fine Arts and Music), Marta Garrido (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences), Monica Lim (independent artist), Linda Sastradipradja (Fine Arts and Music).

Contact: Professor Carol Brown, Coordinating Investigator at carol.brown@unimelb.edu.au

This arts-based research project will explore how collaborating in a performance-related creative endeavour, to create and produce a comedy performance, may foster wellbeing for international students at the University of Melbourne.

This project sits at the junction of language, identity, creativity, the performing arts and education. International student volunteers will explore, experiment and extend their knowledge of language, place and humour to create and produce a comedy performance on the theme of the life of an international student.

The project will offer students the opportunity to:

• connect with others on a creative level
• meet and form friendships with others from a variety of faculties and discipline areas
• learn from and support each other in developing their knowledge, skills and confidence
• enhance their social circles and counter experiences of loneliness in university life.

Students will apply their knowledge of English to explore informal language use outside of academic settings, with increased scope for playfulness, boundary blurring and ‘trespassing’.

The project seeks to discover how the students’ sense of wellbeing, and their confidence in using their oral and written English language skills, may be impacted by these creative endeavours. It will also interrogate the potential pitfalls and challenges of a project of this kind, which may inform the creation and development of future programs of a similar nature.

Team

Richard Sallis (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Diane de Saint Leger (Arts), Jayne Lysk (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences), Danielle Clayman (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences).

Contact: Dr Richard Sallis, Coordinating Investigator at sallis@unimelb.edu.au

Captain Starlight is a creative program that operates in every major children's hospital in Australia. The program is designed to reduce the loneliness, pain and stress often associated with hospitalisation. It does this by engaging users, such as sick children and their parents, in creative activities and play with 'Captain Starlight'. The activity takes place in Starlight Express Rooms – a treatment free zone dedicated to creativity and wellbeing in a hospital environment.

While the program has been successful, the role of creativity in delivering positive wellbeing outcomes to sick children and their parents is not well understood. Indicators suggest a mix of factors, such as the training and skills of Captain Starlight and the design of the Starlight Express Rooms. As such, the program provides a clear view to the intersection of creativity and wellbeing for people facing adversity.

This project will investigate the role of creativity in the work of Captain Starlight. It will deliver creative activities related to the work of Captain Starlight to the homes of users of the program. The activities allow participants to reflect on the impact of the program on their lives. They will also help the research team understand the role of creativity in protecting and scaffolding participants' wellbeing. The project will also provide a theoretical basis to identify which elements of the program could be:

• used standalone
• made mobile
• used in places without Starlight Express Rooms.

These findings will be used to create best practice guidelines for the future training of Captain Starlights. They will also inform the curriculum of the University of Melbourne's online Specialist Certificate of Creativity and Health – which launches in 2020.

Team

Ralph Hampson (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences), Clare Newton (Architecture, Building and Planning), Frederic Kiernan (Fine Arts and Music), Sofia Colabella (Architecture, Building and Planning), Claire Treadgold (University of New South Wales), Lawrence Ashford (University of Sydney).

Partners: Felicity McMahon (Starlight Children's Foundation)

Community assets such as playgrounds are important sites for community development and wellbeing. They provide opportunities for a range of people and needs, such as:

• intergenerational participation
• cultural diversity
• children with disabilities.

A collaboration between University of Melbourne researchers and the Belgium Avenue Neighbourhood House (BANH), we will examine:

• how intergenerational playgrounds contribute to community wellbeing
• how playground use differs between school-age children, adults and seniors
• how playground design can promote diverse and intergenerational user engagement.

The project team will use a variety of data collection strategies, including:

• design and model-making activities for students at Richmond West Primary School
• an online survey about playground usage
• creative submissions of photographs of drawings and models from the public
• in-person surveys and interviews conducted at BANH.

The outcome of the project will include design solutions to wellbeing questions for people living in high-density social housing communities.

Team

Blair Gardiner (Architecture, Building and Planning), Frederic Kiernan (Fine Arts and Music), Trisnasari Fraser (Fine Arts and Music)

Partners: Lydia Dobbin (Belgium Avenue Neighbourhood House)

Contact: Blair Gardiner, Coordinating Investigator: b.gardiner@unimelb.edu.au

Certain new and emerging migrant communities are denied access to literacy and writing skills in their home countries. For this reason, community radio in Australia plays a critical role in supporting their wellbeing, as it is a publicly supported outlet for cultural expression.

This project will gather information about the experiences of community language radio presenters and listeners from migrant communities, focusing on their sense of connection and wellbeing.

By doing this, the creative mechanisms underpinning these social benefits will be more clearly understood. This in turn will generate an enriched understanding of the nature of creativity itself in the context of community language radio.

Publication

Krause A et al (2020) The role of community language radio for understanding creativity and wellbeing in migrant communities in Australia. International Journal of Wellbeing 10(5). doi: 10.5502/ijw.v10i5.1495

Team

John Hajek (Arts), Amanda E Krause (Fine Arts and Music), Anya Lloyd-Smith (Arts), Greg Wadley (Melbourne School of Engineering), Amber Hammill (Auckland University of Technology), John Gillies, Manager (3ZZZ), Jo Curtin (Executive Officer, Community Broadcasting Foundation).

Contact: Professor John Hajek, Coordinating Investigator at j.hajek@unimelb.edu.au

While homophobic and transphobic violence is on the rise internationally, queer performance work endures at a local level – and in the process, it sustains marginalised LGBTQI+ communities.

The project explores:

• the role that creativity in arts festivals and venues plays within queer sociality
• the way in which arts festivals contribute to the wellbeing of those with gender and sexually diverse lives.

The project proposes an innovative conceptual approach – 'feral pedagogies' – to harness this knowledge. Defining feral as 'the domesticated gone wild', this project will use 'feral pedagogies' as a methodology to de-domesticate and de-institutionalise queer knowledges and re-wild them at the centre of academic and queer community practice. This will be achieved through creative work itself, in the form of a ‘Feral Queer Camp’. In this environment, queer performance, and its impact on the wellbeing of queer communities, can be considered directly.

Team

Alyson Campbell (Fine Arts and Music), Hannah McCann (Arts), Jennifer Audsley (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences), Stephen Farrier (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London), Daniel Santangeli (Program Manager, Midsumma Festival), Brenton Geyer (Senior Communications Officer, Living Positive Victoria), Dianne Toulson (General Manager, Theatre Works).

Contact: Associate Professor Alyson Campbell, Coordinating Investigator at alyson.campbell@unimelb.edu.au

This project aims to develop a new measure for understanding the creative strategies for emotion regulation used by young people in relation to music.

This project will explore the ways secondary school students use music to optimise their emotional wellbeing. It will identify and examine the role of creativity in these regulatory strategies. Findings are likely to identify protective factors for wellbeing and risk factors of distress.

Resources will be developed in collaboration with community and departmental research partners. Integrating expertise from music psychology, music therapy and education, this partnership will create an engaging music program that supports young people to use their creative capabilities to optimise learning and lifelong wellbeing.

Team

Tan-Chyuan Chin (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Katrina McFerran (Fine Arts and Music), Edwina Ricci (Project Manager – Maroondah Positive Education Network, DET Victoria), Adam Cooper (Team Leader – Youth and Children's Services, Maroondah City Council), Anita Holman (Coordinator – Youth Development, Yarra Ranges Council).

Contact: Dr Tan-Chyuan Chin, Coordinating Investigator at tanchyuan.chin@unimelb.edu.au

Social health and wellbeing affect individual wellbeing. Yet marginalised communities face barriers accessing healthcare services and support. This means they often miss out on services that could benefit their health and wellbeing and prevent chronic disease. Individual health behaviours are also influenced by broader social and cultural factors.

These communities need new ways to access quality healthcare services – that understand and meet their needs.

Health and wellbeing communication, education and behaviour change are effective when they are relevant, meaningful and culturally sensitive. Creative approaches to communication could allow clients and practitioners talk about health in engaging and accessible ways. They could also help people understand and share health beliefs, motivations and capabilities.

This project brings together researchers and community health practitioners from the Centre for Positive Psychology, University of Melbourne and Your Community Health – a not-for-profit community health service in northern Melbourne.

The project examines the role of creativity within five elements of community health practice:

• health-related communication (speaking, listening, reading, writing, creating, viewing) in diverse cultural and linguistic communities
• planning for health-related behaviour change
• health-related education
• client engagement and self-efficacy about health and wellbeing
• practitioner-client relationships.

The project works with people from Your Community Health. All participants are from priority access populations including:

• people experiencing socio-economic disadvantage
• people from multicultural backgrounds.

We will explore the role of creativity in health and wellbeing, using focus groups, interviews and creative approaches.

The project combines several research areas:

• community-based healthcare
• social health
• positive psychology
• anthropology.

Project findings will inform a larger, future project. This will look at the benefits of creative communication in social health practice and promotion. It will focus on Your Community Health, which currently uses some of these creative practices. Ongoing research also supports partnerships between academic and community settings. This in turn supports evidence-based social-health practice and wellbeing.

Team

Lindsay Oades (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Adrian Hearn (Arts), Jessica Taylor (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Ju-Lin Lee (Your Community Health).

Contact: Professor Lindsay Oades, Coordinating Investigator at lindsay.oades@unimelb.edu.au

This qualitative research examines creativity as a vital aspect of the wellbeing and ageing experiences of 15 – 20  women over 50. The women are participants in a Victorian photography project called 500 Strong created by Australian photographer Ponch Hawkes. The photographs will be part of Flesh after Fifty, an exhibition and series of events promoting positive images of older women.

We will hold interviews and workshops exploring the embodied experiences of the women both as active participants in the photo shoot and as photographed representations. The key questions being addressed include:

• How do women understand and practice creativity?
• How does creativity contribute to women’s sense of wellbeing?
• How is creativity linked to women’s experiences of ageing?

This project aims to counter stereotyped and reductive portrayals of older women that focus on decline and loss. It also aims to contest discourses that address ageing purely as an economic concern. Instead, it conceptualises the experience of ageing as a process where health, creativity and material welfare are interdependent.

The study will contribute to research on creative engagement and wellbeing in later life and supplement public health literature that focuses on ageing as a medical or policy concern. In addition, it hopes to identify women who are not present in this research project. Who might they be and how might they engage with notions of creativity, ageing and wellbeing?

Final report

Moosad L & Vaughan C (2021) Through their lenses: Creativity, wellbeing and women's experiences of ageing. University of Melbourne.

Download report (PDF)

Publication

Moosad L & Vaughan C (2020) Care, collaboration and critique: The intersection of creativity and wellbeing in older women. International Journal of Wellbeing 10(5). doi: 10.5502/ijw.v10i5.1485

Team

Cathy Vaughan (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences), Martha Hickey (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences), Jane Davidson (Fine Arts & Music), Lila Moosad (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences).

Contact: Associate Professor Cathy Vaughan, Coordinating Investigator at cmvaug@unimelb.edu.au

Left, Write, Hook is a creative arts workshop series combining weekly writing and boxing sessions. It is designed to help women who have experienced sexual abuse and trauma to find a connection to their body, mind and spirit through these weekly sessions. The project pairs two contrasting creative acts – writing and boxing – to explore how:

• cognitive and emotional functions can be optimised
• shared identity between women can be strengthened
• personal growth, social bonds and resilience can be nurtured and enhanced.

We hypothesise that the dual approach of written/verbal and embodied creativity serves to enhance the wellbeing of survivors of sexual abuse and trauma. The first hour of each workshop is dedicated to writing, sharing and listening. The second hour is designed to enable women to reclaim their bodies as sites of power and strength, through the physical impact of non-contact boxing for sport.

The project is the idea of Coordinating Investigator Donna Lyon, who wrote about the power of combining writing and boxing on her blog in 2018:

"Boxing has become a metaphor for my recovery and my life as a survivor. The positive effect that boxing has had on me, in terms of my overall health and wellbeing, has been phenomenal. I have met many other women like me and I have a strong desire to share stories of recovery, empowerment and hope, using writing and the sport of boxing to aid this."

The workshops will be filmed, with the intention of material being used as a proof of concept to attract funding for a larger documentary project, pending the outcomes of the research. Interviews will be conducted to assess the results and impact of the workshop.

Final report

Lyon D et al (2021) Left/Write//Hook: The efficacy of writing and boxing in assisting survivors of childhood sexual abuse in moving towards post-traumatic growth. University of Melbourne.

Download report (PDF)

Publication

Lyon D et al (2020) Left / Write // Hook: A mixed method study of a writing and boxing workshop for survivors of childhood sexual abuse and trauma. International Journal of Wellbeing 10(5). doi: 10.5502/ijw.v10i5.1505

Team

Donna Lyon (Fine Arts and Music), Margaret Osborne (Fine Arts and Music; Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences), Steve Thomas (Fine Arts and Music), Shannon Owen (Fine Arts and Music), Khandis Blake (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences).

Contact: Donna Lyon, Coordinating Investigator at donna.lyon@unimelb.edu.au

Social activities in the community that are accessible to a range of people are challenging to find, and often struggle to be genuinely inclusive. Autistic individuals are particularly vulnerable to social exclusion. This is because their ways of engaging with the world are sometimes not well understood by typically developing (non-autistic) people. Reducing isolation and increasing meaningful social networks appear to be protective factors that support wellbeing for all young people, including those on the autism spectrum.

There is a body of research that shows participating in community music making can foster a sense of belonging and connection between group members. But this potential has not been researched in the Australian autistic community. This project will thus evaluate whether social music making can create the conditions for young autistic people to build their social networks.

We understand human social communication other than speech to be fundamentally musical. We also believe that these musical features of communication are inherently creative. The rhythm of our movements and the melody of our voice are vital to convey our meaning to those around us. When there is shared understanding between individuals, there is often a greater sense of belonging and connection. Working from the belief that musical creativity is a natural part of social communication and therefore present in all people, we seek to challenge existing sociocultural frameworks that tend to privilege certain formal or aesthetic criteria in music performance. This bias can result in a failure to recognise creative expression by individuals whose form of communication differs from the norm.

Through a series of music workshops, we’ll challenge beliefs about what creativity is. We’ll explore how creativity can be expanded to reflect greater diversity in the embodied, emotional connections that arise through human expressiveness.

Publication

Thompson G et al (2020) Gathering community perspectives  to inform the design of autism friendly music-making workshops for wellbeing. International Journal of Wellbeing 10(5). doi: 10.5502/ijw.v10i5.1497

Team

Grace Thompson (Fine Arts and Music), Melissa Raine (Arts), Susan Hayward (School of Psychology, Deakin University), Elena Ashley (AMAZE).

Contact: Dr Grace Thompson, Coordinating Investigator at graceat@unimelb.edu.au

The links between the social and emotional wellbeing of people and the physical and spiritual wellbeing of Country are widely recognised in Indigenous public and research spaces.

The role of artistic and creative practice in this nexus is often assumed in the Indigenous context, but there is much more to learn about the nature of this role, and especially how the careers of Indigenous artists are intertwined with the health and wellbeing of people and country in remote Indigenous communities.

Three Indigenous artist-researchers from the Mowanjum Art Centre in the west Kimberley undertook a five-day printmaking residency at the University’s Southbank campus. The artworks will be shown at a public art exhibition in 2020. The residency aimed to illuminate the creative priorities, concepts, processes, practices and desired futures of Indigenous artists through the development of a portfolio of artworks. The works will also be documented in a digital workbook.

This project is seeking to understand what these artistic and creative practices reveal about the relationship between the art industry, in the Indigenous context, and the wellbeing of Indigenous people and country. This project will also investigate how this information might be used to help Indigenous artists and their communities to flourish.

Check out the blog, Healthy Art Careers Blog, for more information.

Team

Megan McPherson (Fine Arts and Music), Kathryn Coleman (Melbourne Graduate School of Education), Sally Treloyn (Fine Arts and Music), Ella Doonan (manager, Mowanjum Art and Cultural Centre).

Contact: Dr Megan McPherson, Coordinating Investigator at mcpherson.m@unimelb.edu.au