About
Arts and Health focuses on the ways in which creative practice can contribute to enhancing wellbeing and to recovery from exposure to traumatic experience. Researchers employ a health humanities approach to engage with individuals, communities and health professionals.
We aim to pursue research and publication opportunities around our approach to creative arts and injury/illness where we focus on process, not content. This contrasts with the extensive body of psychological research on, for example, expressive writing where the content of the writing is prescribed and necessarily involves participants recounting traumatic experiences. Participants with whom we work may choose to creatively work with past trauma or may choose to work with seemingly neutral content—the value is in imagining themselves as a person practicing new skills and thereby seeing themselves as more than an injured or ill person.
In other words, we use creative arts in ways which seek to overcome the 'deficit' focus on people with injury or illness, particularly in how individuals see themselves. We seek to build quantitative and qualitative evidence of the efficacy of that approach for transition—transition out of organisations, transition to new roles within organisations, back into working life after trauma and prevention of trauma.
Contact us
Centre for Creative and Cultural Research
11 Kirinari Street
Bruce ACT 2617
cccr@canberra.edu.au
Higher Degree by Research enquiries:
artsanddesignhdr@canberra.edu.au
