Abstract
While acknowledging the field of affective AI this paper celebrates the emotional intelligence expressed and experienced through the hand, eye, and heart. It does this in an exploration of the innovative arts-based research project, “Expressions of Abuse and Agency: Drawing Lived Experience of Incarceration.” The project was conducted between 2024-25, in the Justice Health program at UNSW, Sydney, Australia. Arts-based health research is shifting understandings of what counts as evidence, and was chosen because it offers a novel approach to informal health education, understood here as knowledge translation. This paper starts with an introduction to the research project using artworks, stories, and poetry created by nine people with lived experience of incarceration. These research participants attended a day-long arts-based research workshop designed and facilitated by the presenter. The next section discusses the two-fold nature of arts-based methods, which are their therapeutic and research capacities. This section also explores ways that arts-based methods are increasingly understood to illuminate subjective dimensions of health and illness. The last part of the study examines the effectiveness of the project’s art outputs as knowledge translation tools. Importantly here, responses to the project’s 12-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGlNe43Dyag and virtual exhibition: https://drawingfree.com.au/ confirm Rieger and Schultz’s (2014) proposition that the arts evoke affectivity because they can express complex deep-seated human emotions. This concept will be further explored using Kossak’s (2009) work on ‘attunement,’ or the intersubjective exchanges that can occur between art works and viewers.
Presenters
Patricia MorganAdjunct Lecturer, Justice Health Program, Population Health, UNSW, New South Wales, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Health Promotion and Education
KEYWORDS
ARTS-BASED HEALTH RESEARCH, JUSTICE HEALTH, KNOWLEDGE TRANSLATION, EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
