You are very warmly welcome to a series of roundtables around mental health, archiving, the arts, and the pandemic which emerges out of the GW4 2022 Crucible on Mental Health and Well-being Research and has been organised by an interdisciplinary team of early career researchers from across the universities of Exeter, Bristol, and Cardiff.
We’ll be meeting online at lunchtime across the first three Fridays of December to hear from a fabulous line-up of speakers from a range of disciplinary as well as professional backgrounds.
In Roundtable 1, on Friday 2 December (12.30-14.00), we’ll open by reflecting on the opportunities and challenges of developing transdisciplinary methodologies in mental health research.
As researchers from very different disciplinary and professional backgrounds, we approach mental health with distinct methodologies, questions, even languages. In this first roundtable, our speakers help us think through a set of foundational questions about doing research across conventional disciplinary or professional boundaries. How can researchers from different backgrounds come together effectively? How can we rethink our discipline-specific approaches and create new ways of understanding key research questions? What are some of the barriers to working together, and how can we address these?
To open up these questions, we’ve brought together three speakers whose work showcases a range of approaches and forms of expertise in relation to mental health and other fields of research. Dr Kirsty Sedgman uses audience research methodologies in order to grapple with the challenge of capturing the sometimes radically individual responses of theatre audiences to the same performances. Over the course of a career which has included working for a decade as a mental health nurse, Prof Alec Grant has combined a wealth of methodologies, including autoethnography and narrative research methods. To research the carriage and transmission of infectious diseases, Dr Amy Thomas has adopted an interdisciplinary approach which applies epidemiology, immunology, and molecular techniques to key research questions. Our speakers will each reflect for 15 minutes on their research and experiences around developing transdisciplinary methodologies, before we open up the discussion to think through these issues together.
Further information and to register
Further roundtables are taking place on:
- Roundtable 2, on Friday 9 December (12.30-14.00), we’ll continue the conversation by exploring the methodological as well as ethical imperatives which accompany any effort to record mental health in times of crisis like the pandemic.
- Roundtable 3, on Friday 16 December (12.30-14.00), we’ll ask: what might looking back at diverse archives of mental health do to and for us in times of (future) crisis?
Our speakers will be sharing their reflections in the first half of each roundtable, leaving us with plenty of time for discussion and connections to develop, so we would love if you were able to join us for any or all sessions to share from your own expertise and research experiences. We are hoping that these conversations continue long after the roundtables themselves are over.