Creativity and Wellbeing

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.

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

Contact: 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?

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: 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.

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.

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

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