Centre for Arts and Wellbeing: Vision Statement and Strategy 2025 

The information below outlines the strategic vision for the University of Brighton’s Centre for Arts and Wellbeing (CAW). It was produced by Co-directors Nick Gant and Helen Johnson, in consultation with our Board and a representative section of our members, including post-graduate research students, early career researchers, Associate Members and senior researchers. The document seeks to reinforce the distinctive character of the Centre, and provide a dynamic direction and responsive framework to guide its future development as an outstanding, internationally-excellent research and knowledge exchange centre.  

 

Creativity, Community, Craft and Communication 

Our vision is to create and maintain a sustainable and vibrant research and knowledge exchange environment. This is modelled through a four point framework characterised by Creativity, Community, Craft and Communication. These factors form the basis against which the Centre maps onto the University’s strategic aims and where its values of creativity, inclusion, partnership and sustainability manifest. The Centre’s community and concerns correspond directly with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and its ambitions to engage practically with global challenges, whilst providing a basis for delivering quality research, knowledge exchange and artistic practice within a distinctive culture that supports academics across all career stages and disciplinary origins.  

Creativity 

The Centre for Arts and Wellbeing provides a distinctive, high profile and impactful platform through which the University’s core value of creativity is operationalised and applied. This recognises the distinctive contribution that UoB staff and students make within the arts as research and knowledge exchange practices, including in the rapidly-developing field of creative and arts-based research methods.     

 

Vision 

  • Our work engages artistic-agency in the services of changes that are needed to respond pragmatically to global challenges and opportunities associated with social, physical, psychological, economic and environmental wellbeing. 
  • The Centre champions and embodies the role of practice-based research and research-based practice.  
  • Creativity is mobilised as a ‘methodological glue’ that unifies a broad cohort of researchers and arts practitioners across a wide range of disciplines, fields and career points.  
  • Within our work, arts and creativity afford inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches that champion new ways of thinking about and practicing inclusive healthcare and wellbeing. 
  • CAW work is constructive and impactful, materialising through practical products, influential artefacts and pioneering processes, places and methodologies.  

 

Strategy 

We will implement these aims through a series of initiatives that include: 

  • Centre-led workshops, conferences, networking events and inventive spaces that support the definition, delivery and dissemination of research and knowledge exchange, using creative means of making research that reinforce and refine approaches that are distinctive to UoB and directly engage actors across industry, agents in authority and governance and NGO/charitable partners.  
  • Strategic investment in the Waste House Hub as a ‘neutral’ space outside of main University campuses, which is able to promote creative engagement with research, and facilitate productive partnerships between a broad range of internal and external collaborators. 
  • Developing a strong portfolio of external income and world-leading outputs in arts and wellbeing, through seed funding innovative research, supporting research dissemination and networking activities, and providing a ‘common room for research’ that is open and inclusive.   
  • Embedding peer-to-peer support and mentoring opportunities, whereby more experienced academics support those at an earlier point in their career trajectories. 

 

Community 

Our community is comprised of academic staff across all career stages and Schools in the University, a vibrant student membership of PGRs and Masters students, and Associate Members from creative, healthcare and voluntary sectors, as well as higher education institutions in North America and Japan. Our commitment to community initiates authentic, pragmatic partnerships and purposes that are enacted locally and extend out regionally, nationally and globally through their relevance, practical application and impact. 

 

Vision 

  • The CAW supports active membership and the operational engagement and co-delivery of aims, objectives and KPIs through a community of research practice, which invests in PGRs, ECRs and mid-career researchers. 
  • The Centre for Arts and Wellbeing is GLOCAL in its values, sensibilities and ambition.  
  • CAW holds and facilitates strategic partnerships that result in collaborative funding opportunities (including those not directly available to UKRI/HE routes) and practical pathways to impact.  
  • The Centre acts as a trusted partner and conduit for research that is genuinely co-produced, often with disenfranchised, disengaged and vulnerable sectors of society.  
  • The CAW drives tangible, sustainable change through the authentically inclusive nature of our research and knowledge exchange.  
  • Our work is inclusive of more-than-human communities that make up our wider ecological relationships and environment.  

 

Strategy 

We will implement these aims through a series of initiatives that include: 

  • A collaboratively-produced definition of ‘active membership,’ which includes and supports all of our members, whilst eliciting engagement and delivery of CAW activities and prioritising UoB KPIs.    
  • Developing and maintaining impactful and productive partnerships with our Associate Members, underpinned by criteria which define a set of mutually-beneficial rights and responsibilities, including a commitment from Associate Members to deliver an event for CAW in the first year of their membership. 
  • Engaging in capacity building in subject areas of traditional strength and emerging potential.  
  • Charging strand leads to define and nurture community within their thematic areas to support the devolved and meaningful delivery of UoB and CAW aims, in collaboration with our PGR and ECR representatives.  
  • Providing advice, guidance and mentoring for doctoral students undertaking practice-based PhDs, and sharing opportunities for inter-disciplinary supervision to support doctoral students across the board.  
     

Craft  

Craft recognises excellence, aspiration and achievement that resonates throughout the areas of practical and applied research in the Centre. We seek to facilitate and enrich engagement with the disciplinary-specific and inter-/trans-disciplinary crafting of quality in research across all levels of our membership. 

 

Vision 

  • We embrace and champion artistry, and the power and role that creative and arts-based forms of research have in the world.  
  • We are makers, and embrace the constructive formation of ideas and outputs with and through alternate modes and mediums of enquiry and dissemination.  
  • We value making-well and well-making, and pursue excellence in critical research and knowledge exchange activities and outputs. 
  • The Centre invests in processes that can elevate and maintain the highest quality media and messaging, with a clear foundation in aesthetics for ambitious, inclusive practice and high standards of artistic quality.    
  • The CAW recognises tensions and opportunities that exist between those who are coming ‘out of the arts’ and those coming ‘into the arts,’ and the need to support inclusive practice by nurturing innovative skill sets, multi-disciplinary knowledge and international reputation.   
  • Our work is impactful, tackling global challenges, and supporting meaningful local, national and international social change. 
  • We value collaboration, co-production and partnership, and invest in developing mutually-beneficial strategic relationships with key stakeholders. 

 

Strategy 

We will implement these aims through a series of initiatives that include: 

  • Investment in the creation of inspiring maker-spaces that fully embrace, encourage and make-for-meaningful material encounters with creative methodologies, and are accessible to a wide range of partners within and beyond the Academy locally, nationally and internationally.   
  • Our ‘common-room-for-research,’ activity and events programmes, which support inter-disciplinary engagement with internationally-leading creative and arts-based methods for research and knowledge exchange. 
  • Funding, advising on and instigating partnerships that support a community-engaged model for research, knowledge exchange and creative practice. 
  • Crafting high quality communications, events and creative/research outputs that use innovative, inclusive methods to engage a wider public and further build the Centre’s international reputation. 

 

Communication 

The Centre invests in high quality research and knowledge exchange communication practice, through the work of our members and the means through which this work is captured and shared. It foregrounds creativity, inclusivity and sustainability, acknowledges the power of the arts, and invests in design and production values. 

 

Vision 

  • The CAW nurtures a clear and coherent identity as an internationally-renowned centre at the forefront of research and knowledge exchange, connecting arts and wellbeing, and organised according to our distinctive research strands. 
  • The Centre utilises innovative, multi-faceted and accessible means of communication, which enable us to engage with a wide-ranging international audience both within and beyond higher education institutions. 
  • We attract and nurture robust collaborations with external partners, organisations, communities and individuals to continually develop and disseminate a unique, ongoing and impactful agenda that aligns with the global challenges at the heart of UoB strategy. 
  • Our work delivers unique, motivational media and meaningful material messaging for research and knowledge exchange through high quality communications, which support research-based teaching across all levels of the student body. 

 

Strategy 

We will implement these aims through a series of initiatives that include: 

  • Maintaining an up-to-date website that provides clear, accessible messaging on the Centre’s aims, values, strategy and activities. 
  • Maintaining a current blog and social media presence that showcases the ongoing work of the CAW in an inclusive, accessible and innovative format. 
  • Funding and facilitating a GLOCAL programme of diverse, dynamic and creative events, including international-standard conferences, symposia, exhibitions, screenings and maker workshops that communicate our position at the forefront of the intersection between arts and wellbeing, as articulated through our research strands. 
  • Attracting high quality visiting researchers, PGR students and collaborators through funded projects, networking events, online messaging, and the implementation of active membership criteria. 
  • Ensuring clear and timely communication with our members through email, online posts and face-to-face interactions. 
  • Championing the communicative power of visual and material arts research in a diversity of well-crafted dissemination media. 
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