Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship (360G-Wellcome-203998_Z_16_Z)

I want to make the case for how conversation can both challenge and enhance the empirical side of health practice and research, to develop ways people interface with biomedical science and to infuse this space of coexistence with desire, creating spaces where different kinds of people want to be. I want to co-create new ways to behave in this space and to talk about what we know. I hope this will be a space where our cognitive and associative, considered and impulsive, feeling and desiring selves ask important scientific questions. I will do this by developing, establishing and disseminating modes of conversation that use performance methodologies as a crucial part of health communication and care. I will experiment with how these interventions enable people to air their own stories, thinking and perceptions on important issues, working toward making knowledge exchange more egalitarian and influencing social change connected to health and the human condition. My ongoing research experiments with performance as a means of public engagement and I have used these experiments to provide diverse (and often socially excluded) groups with platforms to think about and debate serious issues in safe stimulating environments. Interventions have included Long Tables, Fantasy Personas, Creative Hosting, Porch Sitting, Green Screening and my YouTube channel hosted by my own fantasy persona/interlocutor, Tammy WhyNot. Examples of this work include: collaboration with Dr Alison Mears, Consultant in GUM/HIV, on Q and As facilitated by Tammy in theatres and online; What Tammy Needs to Know About Getting Old and Having Sex, a performance collaboration with older adults, including workshops with elders in Croatia, where I lived in an elders’ care home for ten days; DemTech, an AHRC/EPSRC funded collaborative project with psychologist Prof Pat Healey investigating how elders could be empowered to think about and influence future technologies through adopting fantasy personas. Although this work will be applicable to an intergenerational public, I want to start with my current research collaborators, elders, before expanding to include other diverse groups of people. Despite being a rapidly increasing demographic, elders are becoming progressively more invisible and absent from decision making and public life, leading to isolation, depression, ambulatory health conditions and decreased resilience. As an elder myself I want to be an authentic interlocutor who engages scientists and the public and clinicians and seniors. This is one way my work is unique; usually such activities are developed 'for' elders by others (Bliss 2016). I want to create elder-led visibility, confidence and wellbeing, to create robust evidence to demonstrate how agency creates wellbeing for elders, how my methods contribute to this, how they can contribute better, how conversation can effectively engage the public in debate about issues raised by biomedical research, and how this can lead to better informed research outcomes and policy-making. I want to influence policy, creating long term and large scale empowerment, which directly impacts on improved health conditions.