Tagged / practice-based research

Community Pride Podcast: Research Through Storytelling in Action

Community Pride, a new podcast series created by Bournemouth University postdoctoral researcher Dr Kayla Jones, has officially launched as part of Learning from Big Local, a platform showcasing community-led change across England.

The podcast is a creative output of the AHRC-funded StoryArcs project—a practice-based research collaboration between BU and Bath Spa University. The series was produced during Kayla’s time as a postdoctoral researcher under the supervision of Dr Lyle Skains at BU, who led on the funding acquisition and collaborative partnership that made this project within StoryArcs possible.

Each episode of Community Pride dives deep into the lived experiences of residents in communities supported by the Big Local programme, a 10-year initiative managed by Local Trust. Kayla worked closely with Local Trust to identify and engage community members whose stories reflect resilience, creativity, and pride in place. She conducted interviews, gathered local perspectives, and took the project from raw audio to fully produced episodes—writing, editing, and sound-designing each one herself.

“It brings together research, resident stories and practical insight into what it really takes for communities to lead change,” says Local Trust’s Lucy Terry. “And how funders, researchers, policymakers and practitioners can enable it.”

This podcast embodies the ethos of practice-based research—fusing academic insight with creative storytelling to reach both scholarly and public audiences. It’s a shining example of how postdoctoral research can extend beyond traditional publishing routes, bringing the voices of underrepresented communities directly into the spotlight.

Listen to the podcast here:

New Social Work Education paper published

international, Publishing, writing

Congratulations to Dr. Alex Fry (Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Health & Illness) and Professor Emeritus Jonathan Parker who were part of a project researching the use of creative methodologies in pedagogy. Their latest paper ‘Using the arts in social work education for short-term European mobility: evaluating student experiences on an Erasmus+ blended intensive program‘ resulting from this work was published last month in the journal Social Work Education (a Routledge journal) [1].
Well done!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Reference:
  1. Frampton, M., Schiller, U., Parker, J.,  Hartogh, T., Arlinghaus, G.A., Fry, A.D.J., Autio, K., Ndhlovu, N. (2025): Using the arts in social work education for short-term European mobility: evaluating student experiences on an Erasmus+ blended intensive program, Social Work Education, DOI: 10.1080/02615479.2025.2466707  

New guide to Practice-Based Research published today!

student research

Book cover image with title, subtitle, author. Background is variegated orange, with the white outline of a human figure holding an upside-down light bulb.Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects: A Practical Guide for Arts Student Researchers by Bournemouth University Associate Professor Lyle Skains is available from today.

The book is aimed primarily at upper undergraduate and Master’s students undertaking practice-based research in the arts, though it is also suitable for PhD candidates and researchers and supervisors new to practice-based research projects.

The discussion starts with definitions and a brief background to practice-related research in the arts and contextualization of practice-based methods within that frame. The bulk of the text is a step-by-step approach to designing, conducting, and writing-up practice-based research projects; each step is supplemented with examples of practice-related research, exercises for progressing methods design and evaluating research approach, and lists for further reading.

Designing and Conducting Practice-Based Research Projects has been requested and should soon be available through the Bournemouth University Library.

New Book on Using Interactive Digital Narrative for Health & Science Communication

Book coverNew publication: Using Interactive Digital Narrative for Health & Science Communication

I’m delighted to announce that my new book publishes this week, as it provides an excellent example of the kinds of things we’re trying to do here at Bournemouth through the Sustainable Storytelling Lab and the Science, Health, and Data Communications Research Group: harness the power of narrative storytelling to effect positive behaviour change related to the UN SDGs. It also offers an overview of how two very interdisciplinary teams formed (thanks to a Crucible program) and established successful patterns of working, despite our vastly different spheres of expertise.

Book description:

Both the United Nations and the World Health Organization stress the need to address numerous increasingly urgent ‘global challenges’, including climate change and ineffectiveness of medication for communicable diseases.

Despite climate change resulting from human activity, most humans feel their contribution is minimal; thus any effort made toward reducing individual carbon footprint is futile. Likewise, individual patients feel their health is their own problem; current increases in outbreaks of formerly controllable diseases like measles and tuberculosis show that this is not the case. There is a dire need to instil a stronger sense of personal responsibility, to act as individuals to resolve global issues, and the pilot studies presented in Using Interactive Digital Narrative in Science and Health Education offer an entertainment-as-education approach: interactive digital narrative.

The researchers on these teams cross diverse disciplinary boundaries, with backgrounds in chemical engineering, microbiology, romantic studies, film studies, digital design, pedagogy, and psychology. Their approach in Using Interactive Digital Narrative in Science and Health Education to interdisciplinary research is discussed herein, as is the practice-based approach to crafting the interactive narratives for health and science communication and for specific audiences and contexts.