Exploring belonging through art
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Reflecting on an arts-based approach to belonging - Facilitating engagement of people with profound learning disabilities in self-advocacy and research
IRAS ID
311562
Contact name
Melanie Nind
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Southampton
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 5 months, 23 days
Research summary
This project brings together academics, arts-practitioners, and self-advocates and their families and allies to explore the potential of arts-based activities for facilitating friendships and belonging for people with profound learning disabilities within a local self-advocacy organization.
This project aims to: 1. Explore the potential of arts-based activities as a foundation for friendships and self-advocacy work that includes people with profound learning disabilities. 2. Continuously reflect on and address the challenges of engaging people with profound learning disabilities in self-advocacy and in research. 3. Identify or develop an evaluation approach that is sufficiently sensitive and nuanced to understand what is going on, how people feel about it, what they gain, what they do differently, and what difference this makes.
Arts practitioners will provide three arts-based workshops (April-June 2022) as a vehicle for fostering participation, sense of belonging, self-expression, and reflecting together, bringing people into contact with each other within an immersive space built together with arts materials. We will be engaging in reflective discussion online and offline regarding how the arts-based approaches can be used to engage people with profound and multiple learning disabilities in self-advocacy and research, and how we can evaluate what we are doing. Photographic records will be used to log developments and provoke reflections in a form of stimulated recall, reflection and dialogue. Everyone’s knowledge and way of knowing (verbal or sensory) will be valued equally. We will be exploring ways to seek and capture the responses of people with profound learning disabilities directly and not just through proxies.REC name
London - Camden & Kings Cross Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/LO/0135
Date of REC Opinion
17 Mar 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion