Representing Communities: Developing the Creative Power of People to Improve Health and Wellbeing Scottish Health Council: Research & Public Involvement Knowledge Exchange Perth - March 2015 Issie MacPhail & Sarah-Anne Munoz UHI Division of Health Research, Rural Health & Wellbeing

What? - Aim & Approach To explore how community representations produced through creative arts practices can be used as forms of evidence to inform health-related policy and service developments This project starts from the conviction that the creative arts, along with modes of analysis and critique derived from the humanities, can play a transformative role in the process of improving communication, dialogue and knowledge exchange

Where? - Case study locations

  Why? Ken Wilber’s ‘interacting dimensions’ and public health models to date, from Hanlon et al Subjective-Interior Objective-Exterior Individual level I The inner world of the individual: how I think and understand myself; my values; my ethical stance. It The physical body and brain; the results of empirical, objective study of human experience and the physical world that produce scientific evidence. Collective level We Our inter-subjective or cultural world learned, shared, beliefs and values; our collective, negotiated and symbolic system of meanings; the basis for our ethics. Its Economies; social structures and hierarchies; organizations; government policies; the world of business, production; eco-systems. Mc work is concentrated in the left quadrants and makes inroads into challenging discourses of loss and lack in bottom right quadrant. pp79-80. The basic public health models to date ignore the left hand quadrants and only engage with the right hand quadrants.   ‘Awareness of the upper left quadrant has largely been restricted to models and theories of individual motivation and behaviour change, while little serious attention is paid to the inter-subjective world of the lower left quadrant.’ P79

… a contribution to tackling this challenge?

How? Co-production…...