Centre for

Social Futures

What’s Up With Everyone? is a campaign to support mental health literacy among young people, with Academy-award winning Aardman (Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep etc.). Led by Professor Paul Crawford, it's funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant #AH/T003804/1).

The Arts for Health series is produced by Prof Paul Crawford, Director of the Centre for Social Futures and Emerald publishing bookstore. The series will consist of 24 books (currently 16 titles published, Dec 2024), each focusing on a different topic which can be used as a therapeutic tool in pusuit of improved mental health and wellbeing.

During the first lockdown of 2020, Professor Paul Crawford and his son, Jamie Orion Crawford researched the history, origins and cultural context of the concept of 'cabin fever.'

This Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project aims to produce an in-depth understanding of Florence Nightingale, by mapping her family connections with the East Midlands.

Clay Transformations was a project that formed part of the "Creative Practice as Mutual Recovery" (CPMR) programme.

IRGs represent smaller common interest collaborations that have been generated under the broader heading of social and cultural futures in mental health. The IRGs incubate and develop areas of mental health research where momentum currently exists to possibly convert into additional Centres of Excellence should they reach critical capacity.

This Research Group brings Centre for Social Futures members together to explore therapeutic communities, psychotherapy, enabling environments, compassionate environments, psychologically informed environments (i.e. PIEs and PIPEs), successful caregiving environments (e.g. the secure base model), etc. Such therapeutic services occur in numerous settings including mental health, learning disability, personality disorder, and dual diagnosis.

Reality of experience Vs ‘expert’ diagnosis.

This project (supported by a grant from the Heathrow Community Fund) involved creating an outdoor craft work that helped demonstrate and explain some of the mental and emotional distress felt by our Greencare group members.

The Research Interest Group "Growing better lives" has conducted research exploring a novel engagement processes with therapeutic services for individuals diagnosed with personality disorders.

‘Greencare’ is a group (provided by Growing Better Lives) for people with a diagnoses of personality disorder or similar. As part of the development of a new twelve-week evaluation project different ideas were shared with service users as to which type of scale could be used to assess their experience of that day’s Greencare.

A writing project that seeks to contribute to the development and enhancement of the social and cultural environment of inclusion for refugees arriving from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

A multi-country project involving a range of interdisciplinary groups, artists, health professionals and people in long term recovery. The Arts Social Change Project spans four countries France, Italy, Lithuania and the UK.

As children and young people’s social world becomes increasingly complex, the digital environment is recognised as a major contributing factor. Promoting a better understanding of how children and young people’s daily lives (school and family) are influenced by their digital experience presents a new and substantial challenge towards developing a positive culture of mental health.

The experience of trauma is often felt as a total shattering of previously held assumptions that profoundly disrupt an individual's social and cultural environment. Utilising the creativity of art to facilitate the cathartic expression of the experience of distress, the visual arts hold, facilitate and activate the processes of healing.

This newly developed integrated research group, under the leadership of Professor Jon Arcelus, aims to work with clinical and non clinical academics, clinicians, and the LGBTQ+ community to develop research projects aimed at improving the wellbeing of this community.

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA), which includes inter-generational, sexual violence and intimate partner violence, is now recognised as a global societal and public health issue. DVA impacts significantly on the lives and health of those affected - this includes wider family members and especially children.

Project Jugaad is exploring mental health and resilience narratives of migrants in India using community theatre methodology.