Mary Robson, creative facilitator in arts in health & education on Wellcome Trust-funded project Hearing the Voice (Durham University) will speak to us on ‘Inside and also Independent: The Role of a Creative Facilitator in Interdisciplinary Research Projects’. All welcome. Full abstract and speaker biography below.

Part of the Centre for Medical History seminar series at University of Exeter

Abstract 

It is often assumed that the Principal Investigator and/or other senior members of an interdisciplinary research project will take sole responsibility for organising and chairing research meetings and for ensuring positive group dynamics. When planning the Hearing the Voice research project, the directors felt that the project as a whole could benefit from the expertise of someone specialised in creative approaches to facilitation; someone independent who could take responsibility for convening  research meetings and building the wider community of the project in ways which would harness the creative potential inherent to interdisciplinary working. Thus the role of the Creative Facilitator was planned.

Mary Robson – Biography 

Mary trained as a theatre designer and now works as a creative facilitator and social pedagogue – she works with people to make things. She is the Associate for Arts in Health and Education at the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University and is Creative Facilitator on two Wellcome Trust–funded research projects at Durham University – Hearing the Voice and The Life of Breath. Her pioneering role there is to build the community of the researchers, with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinarity and transferable methodology. Mary is director of Roots and Wings, an influential arts-in-health project currently based in inner city Bradford. Their work focuses on the social and emotional development of children through longitudinal arts-based projects that put children in the driving seat of cultural change. Mary was awarded a NESTA Fellowship and has received a Royal Society of Public Health award for ‘innovative and outstanding contributions to arts and health’. She is an invited member of the Ethics Board for CUIDAR , a European-wide project aiming to enhance the resilience of children, young people and urban societies to disasters and enable disaster responders to meet children and young people’s needs more effectively.