SHARE and the RCS Innovation Studio are delighted to host an in-person symposium on the theme of Creative Health on 31 May 2023 at the The Byre Theatre, St Andrews.

The aim of the symposium is to open up the theme and explore what the possibilities might be to link creativity and health, considering both impact, intervention, disruption and other forms of engagement. We welcome proposals for 10-minute presentations and 15-minute creative interventions, which could involve film, music, performance, participatory work, work-in-progress, re-stagings. Proposals could be from any discipline (including music, drama, dance, history, religious studies, literature, creative writing, philosophy, art history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography, microbiology, biology, immunology, bacteriology) and could report on research undertaken, dream about potential projects, and/or show work that engages with any of these themes:

• Well-being vs ill-being
• Becoming a healthy/creative practitioner
• Injury, recovery, cure
• Chronic illness
• Fantasies of healing
• Lived experience of illness and/or recovery
• Creative interventions into health
• Creativity impacted by health issues
• Compound crises and health: pandemic stress/climate grief/cost of living crisis
• Creative health and communities
• Creative health and the planet
• Creativity and mental health
• Creativity and disability
• Embodied strategies for health
• Interdisciplinary challenges and opportunities in creative health

The event will be in person but participants who cannot attend are welcome to submit in video format. We will be unable to make the event hybrid but it will be documented and disseminated at a later date.

The event is free and lunch and refreshments will be provided.

We seek to accommodate all access and participatory needs: if you have any queries or concerns about what exactly the symposium entails, please get in touch.

Speakers and presenters should send us:

• a brief description of their 10-minute talk or their 15-minute creative presentation (approx.. 150 words)
• a question/provocation around a theme that might be used as a prompt for further discussion
• (optional) a quote, link, exercise, piece of music, work, they would like to share as part of a creative health offering to other participants and attendees

Deadline: 3 April 2023 at 5pm

Send to SHARE@rcs.ac.uk

We will have three slots available for 10-minute presentations and three slots for 15-minute creative interventions. We will also have an opportunity to share materials in other formats. Get in touch with us if the symposium format does not fit.

Those not invited to present might be still invited to prepare a poster or produce audio or submit work for later dissemination.

Speakers should expect to hear by Monday 20 April

(Image: Sarah Hopfinger Pain and I)