野狼社区

At a glance

Research team

Discipline

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

Department of Religions and Theology

Partners

Poverty Truth Community (Glasgow)

Poverty Truth Community (Greater 野狼社区)

The question: What happens when we bring creative reflection to everyday inequalities?

Inequalities are often separated by different categories, whether in policy and government, or in research areas. Housing as different from mental health. Food poverty as different from children鈥檚 wellbeing. Asylum and disability as different again.

This can mean that the complexity of people鈥檚 lives is reduced to an issue, rather than seeing how various inequalities show up in people鈥檚 daily experiences. Equally it can ignore what people have already been doing to navigate these concerns, care for their community, and create wider change.

These issues were at the forefront of The Embodied Everyday project that asked what would happen if the research project was based on people exploring their everyday experiences together, with space to support creativity and conversation.

The idea

Working with members of Poverty Truth groups in Greater 野狼社区 and Glasgow, the project examined how issues such as poverty, housing, disability, racism and mental health are often treated separately, even though they are deeply connected in people's everyday lives.

The project began with four 鈥榮teering group鈥� sessions, led by Dr Radford and participants from different Poverty Truth groups, to ensure the project was designed in collaboration with people taking part. The steering group considered what questions were important to shape the research and how people wanted to take part.

As this took place during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, the steering group had to think carefully about access and energy levels. As well, the steering group considered whether responding to creative prompts in a group on a video call would be a good way to work together. In experimenting with these questions, the steering group tried out different approaches, before settling on sending people creative journalling packs with prompts, and inviting people to take part in online reflective group workshops.

Participants took part in reflective workshops and kept creative journals using writing, drawing, collage, photography and voice recordings. These humanities-based methods enabled people to express experiencesand understandings that might be difficult to capture through more traditional research approaches, resulting in the public-facing digital resource, .听
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The creative reflective research

The research created opportunities for participants' experiences to inform wider conversations about inequality. For more than a decade, Poverty Truth Commissions across the UK have asked: 鈥榃hat if people who struggled against poverty were involved in making decisions about tackling poverty?鈥�

The project started with weekly sessions of online reflective workshops, with people using their creative journal at times that suited them. They could write, draw, collage, use photographs, doodle, and also send voice notes. The project emphasised that creativity comes in lots of different forms and particularly thought about 鈥榚veryday鈥� forms of creativity that are often overlooked, including cooking, playing, and imagining together if the world could be different.

The materials from the workshops and in the journals reflected how people make meaning in different ways in their lives, the responses were very specific to each individual but also showed the sense of community in listening to and supporting one another.

From research to impact

The project's creative reflection approach created space for everyday insights that are often overlooked in traditional research. Central to this work were long-standing humanities questions like 鈥榃hose knowledge?鈥� or 鈥榃hat kind of knowledge?鈥�. By working collaboratively with participants, the research challenged assumptions about knowledge and power, encouraging audiences to reconsider how lived experience is recognised and understood.

notes that listening to lived experience is not a one-off event. It requires recognising the thoughtful work communities put in to reflect on and share their experiences, and not losing that context. As Filled to the Brim states:

鈥�We can鈥檛 be summarised or understood completely in these pages. We keep living, changing, creating, reshaping our worlds. We encourage you to keep listening to and with people who are most impacted by inequalities in our society鈥�

Through ongoing dialogue with participants, the project developed a creative output that reflected the richness and individuality of their experiences. Rather than categorising stories into predefined themes, the digital collection presents journal pages, workshop responses and creative works that capture the complexity of everyday life and the ingenuity people draw upon in response to inequality. The collection takes its name from a poem written by a participant.

Since its publication, has continued to extend the reach of the research, sparking conversations about how inequality is understood and addressed. It invites audiences to consider a different starting point: what becomes possible when we move beyond categorising experiences and instead centre people's knowledge, creativity and lived realities?

The difference it made

• Creating space for reflection and connection: Participants reported that combining creative journalling with small-group workshops helped them reflect on their own experiences while learning from people with different backgrounds and perspectives. The process created opportunities for personal reflection, connection and solidarity across diverse experiences of inequality.
• Changing research practice: The project demonstrated how collaborative research can move beyond extractive approaches that simply collect people's stories. Participants were involved in shaping the research and deciding on outputs, helping to establish a model of co-produced research that values community knowledge and creativity. Dr Radford has highlighted how steering groups and collaborative design processes have subsequently influenced their wider approach to research practice.
• Broadening public understanding of inequality: Filled to the Brim challenged narrow discussions of poverty by showing how housing, health, discrimination, care, belonging and everyday survival are interconnected. By sharing participants' creative reflections through a publicly accessible digital resource, the project has encouraged richer public conversations about inequality, lived experience and social change.