Public Engagement
As part of their Policing, Culture and Community body of work, Rachel Lewis and Jackie Hodgson (Warwick Law School) have been working in collaboration with the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on a number of creative projects. In the most recent project, Keeping us Safe?, creative practitioners - Keiren Hamilton Amos, Corey Weekes and Jay Zorenti-Nakhid – spent several months working with groups of pupils at two secondary schools in Coventry. Through creative methods including drama, music, and spoken word, the pupils explored their experiences and perspectives on some of the key themes in our research – policing, safety, authority, power, and care.
Through the course of the project, the groups constructed creative outputs through which they could express their ideas. The project culminated with a sharing of this creative work at an event at The Belgrade Theatre for an invited audience of teachers and school staff, family, friends, and other creative practitioners. One school group aired their short film, which depicted a tense encounter with a police officer and expressed, through rap, their anxieties and distrust towards the police as an institution. The other group gave a live rap performance, their two tracks exploring complicated ideas around generational trauma and around possibilities for hope. They followed this live performance with a Q+A where they spoke about the tracks they had put together, and shared their experiences of the project.
The sharing events were an important opportunity for these young people to see their hard work come to fruition, and for a wider audience to actively engage with the perspectives and ideas of a group of people who are very seldom listened to, on their own terms, by adults.
Our work with these young people continues with an augmented reality installation as part of a Spotlight-funded collaborative project with colleagues in Design Studies.
Funded by an ESRC IAA award, Stella Chatzitheochari collaborated with the Anti-Bullying Alliance to create an animation on school bullying experiences of disabled children and young people in England, drawing on evidence from her research article published in Sociology (joint work with Sam Parsons from IOE and Lucinda Platt from LSE). The video is hosted at the University of Warwick webpage and has been used to inform resources by the Anti-Bullying Alliance as well as disability charities like Mencap.
As part of the Vulnerable State ProjectLink opens in a new window, Ana Chamberlen and her colleagues from Warwick Law School (Prof. AlivertiLink opens in a new window and Prof. CarvalhoLink opens in a new window) have been developing a series of reflective practice training workshops supported by a Policy Support Fund and drawing on research findings from their Leverhulme Trust funded study on frontline workers in the criminal justice and administrative justice domains.
The ongoing activities, facilitated by the reflective practice consultant Charlie Weinberg, engage groups of frontline workers on various aspects concerning emotional labour, trauma, and these workers’ engagements with vulnerable populations. The team is currently delivering these career development training events to prison staff and prison welfare staff working across various prison establishments in England.
The sessions are taking place at Newbold Revel HMPPS training college and are endorsed by various prisons and regional directorate groups. Separately, the team are also delivering such sessions to police staff working at Warwickshire police, including their wellbeing team. These activities will culminate in a multi-stakeholder, policy event in the summer where cross-sector recommendations will be considered. The team is also preparing a policy report for Autumn 2025 evaluating the impact of these training activities on different staff teams. These efforts are part of a wider, and longer-term engagement with frontline workers and senior managers working across asylum bureaucracy, prisons, and police which in the past included a series of workshops and seminars involving legal, policy, institutional and activist groups.
As part of the AHRC funded Captive ArtsLink opens in a new window project, and with the support of an additional ESRC Impact Acceleration Account fund, Ana ChamberlenLink opens in a new window, Ruth BernatekLink opens in a new window, Sally ForemanLink opens in a new window and Faye ClaridgeLink opens in a new window, have hosted an international, multi-stakeholder global arts from prison symposium involving several artists, activists, journalists, GLAM and criminal justice sector practitioners, prison service personnel, Arts Council and education providers, academics, and others.
The event was hosted at Warwick Arts Centre in November 2024 and involved a series of expert panellists, visual arts exhibitions (including among others, works by Steel door StudiosLink opens in a new window , We RoarLink opens in a new window, and arts from the MENA regionLink opens in a new window), music, poetry and theatre performances by leading artists and arts organisations in the sector. For more details, see the event report hereLink opens in a new window.
The Captive arts team has also been hosting an ongoing seminar series, ‘Aesthetics and Justice’Link opens in a new window , with various talks from academics, artists and practitioners on all things justice and the arts. Recently, the team also launched the International Justice Arts Network (IJAN) involving over 80 members from across all continents. It seeks to create opportunities for justice and arts researchers, practitioners, and campaigners from across the world to connect and to engage in various exchanges and collaborations. For more details on IJAN, see hereLink opens in a new window.