The Health & Resilience Project

UNESCO

The Health & Resilience Project is a collaboration between the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health and Quay Words,  supported by Exeter City of Literature. It seeks to provide spaces in which self-identified women and non-binary people can explore their experiences of wellness and illness through creative expression. Using poetry and art, we visit the places, practices, and people we turn to in times of ill-health, change and difficulty, and seek-out the stories that illuminate our experiences. Throughout autumn 2022, we will welcome poets, artists, and members of the public to the Custom House to join us in this exciting project. Through free reading events, workshops, and our online virtual scrapbook, we hope to provide opportunities for engagement with this important subject in diverse ways for diverse groups of people.

The project will:

• Provide workshops and readings to explore creative expressions of health and resilience;
• Create a digital platform, as a virtual scrapbook, to capture stories and other creative expressions of health and resilience; and
• Culminate in a seminar event, on 25 November 2022 (the UN International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women), bringing researchers and creative practitioners together, in a celebration of the work undertaken.

Project Aims & Objectives

The aims of this project are:

• To develop engaged practice by collaborating with Literature Works, and engaging with womxn in the community;
• To understand similar and differing responses to the theme of health and resilience, and to provide a space in which experiences can be shared and engaged with;
• To build a collection of voices and stories from which those living in unwell bodies may draw strength and comfort;
• To showcase the transdisciplinary and engaged research done at the Wellcome Centre.

The objectives of this project are:

• To create a digital platform that will host a ‘virtual scrapbook’.
• To secure ethics approval for the project.
• To share the platform widely so that women and non-binary people with experiences of health and resilience may access and contribute to it.
• To engage with experiences shared with possibility of identifying further areas for research and/or projects (academic or within the community).

 

The website is now live! Find out more here