Mental Health Futures
The theme’s ethos centres lived, felt, and embodied experiences of mental health and ill health through inclusive, co-design, and transdisciplinary research practices. The group draws on a range of participatory methods that foreground lived experience including narrative approaches; arts-based, creative, and visual methods; and digital and performance ethnography. Through a strong applied focus, Mental Health Futures theme members are committed to establishing partnerships with people experiencing mental and emotional distress, and their supporters. Theme members also collaborate with peer-led and grassroots organisations, service providers, and government to design research and produce outcomes that are meaningful for and beneficial to the community.
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Human-Environmental Health & Wellbeing
This approach follows understandings that to care for multi-species environments, is a practice of care for communities and individuals. By conceptualising the health and wellbeing of people and environments as embedded in reciprocal relationships, this theme encourages the use of place-based and ethnographic methods to address issues affecting local, regional, national, and planetary health and wellbeing. Drawing on feminist, affective, embodied, material, and more-than-human approaches, this Human-Environmental Health and Wellbeing is concerned with transdisciplinary collaborations.
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Arts & Creative Practice for Health & Wellbeing
The theme focuses on arts-based methods, creative methods, participatory and embodied methods for co-design inclusive of non-dominant ways of knowing and marginalised populations. The group draws on critical social thinking including affect and emotion studies, critical disability studies, critical mental health studies, and feminist ethics and methodologies to promote the potential of creative and performance fields for advancing public pedagogy for social change. The group is committed to establishing the visibility and impact of creative methodologies, in particular. We collaborate with community, arts and other industry partners, service providers and governments to develop innovative interventions for contemporary societal challenges.
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Design & Digital Media Technologies for Human Wellbeing
The theme brings expertise such as design thinking, co-design, and experience design to create impactful and innovative digital media experiences and solutions to enhance positive outcomes for individuals and communities. The theme has a particular focus on developing applications using virtual reality, motion capture, and associated technologies for a variety of social and arts-based contexts. We welcome collaboration across various disciplines and industries, to speculate, invent and design the next generation of digital interventions for human health and wellbeing.
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Research Impact & Societal Engagement
We focus on theoretical developments and methodological innovations in research practice that foster effective engagement with potential research beneficiaries, leading to positive social change. We bring together researchers who work on meta-level research strategies that foster societal impact, such as: developing impact-focused methodologies; assessing public communication strategies; implementing co-creation practices with non-academic partners; evaluating engagement and impact strategies; and developing discipline-appropriate strategies for open research practices.
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