Toni King | School of Education, Sport and Health Sciences | Supervisors: David Haines, Chris Cocking, & Sandy Walker
My Doctoral research explores participant-developed images of experiences of power during conversations in a mental health context, alongside multimodal analysis of body gesture and discourse.
I was so thrilled to present a poster and two ‘lightening talks’ (very short presentations designed to briefly introduce key ideas, topics or problems) on this project at the ‘Refocus on Recovery’ conference. I first presented my PhD concept there in 2019, so it was a sweet moment to close that loop. More importantly, I was able to attend the event with two Lived Experience Research Advisers, Dan and Clare, who have worked closely with me over the last six years, coproducing much of this work.
I presented an overview of the research approach and early findings, including the different gestures and language used when discussing experiences of ‘power-over’ or ‘power-with.’ Dan and Clare presented on the experience of coproducing this work, including the challenges and benefits they have encountered. This really brought to life our poster, which included more detail about how we developed the approach and how we articulated our separate contributions.
It wasn’t too great a leap for us to develop the idea of embodying our coproduction. Using a grant gratefully received from our UoB Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, we designed t-shirts with participant-developed images on the front and findings and study QR code on the back. This was a really enjoyable and creative way to draw attention to the topic and how we approached it, as well as making it easy for people to spot and connect with us to ask questions later.
Now I just need to work on my posing-for-photos-face…
The conference book with links to view submitted posters and our lightening talk abstracts is available at: https://www.researchintorecovery.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Abstract-Booklet-RonR2025.pdf.
If you’d like to know more about my research or presentations, please visit: https://spices-research.com/
