Practice Research

Producing innovative work at the intersection of creative and critical practice, researchers and practitioners are transforming literary practice at the national and international level, enabling future generations of writers through the Leeds Poetry Centre and National Poetry Centre, and changing public perceptions of major issues including illness and well-being, biodiversity loss and climate change. Research-informed creative writing workshops have raised awareness about coercive control and generated significant benefits for survivors of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence.

Through a series of innovative interdisciplinary projects, School of English poets John Whale, Zaffar Kunial, Jess Richards, Kimberly Campanello, Matt Howard, and Caitlin Stobie are working to change the practice and perception of poetry and its role in the debates surrounding these key issues. This is being achieved by working with a broad range of cohorts, from schools and community groups new to poetry through to poets at the start of their publishing career.

Partnerships are at the core of our work,  and we are engaged with a range of both internal and external partners, such as the Brotherton Library, the Institute of Transport Studies and the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds, but also organisations such as RSPB, BirdLife International, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, Word Up North, West Yorkshire Combined Authority and the Laurel Prize.

Led by Katy Mullin and Hannah Roche (University of York), Coercive Control: From Literature into Law is a research network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2015, domestic violence legislation in England and Wales was extended to make ‘controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship’ an offence. Although coercive control has only recently become a crime, it has a long and disturbing history in imaginative literature. This project aims to enrich understandings of the telltale signs and patterns of coercive control through an engagement with a diverse range of literary representations. It has involved running guided reading and creative writing workshops with service users of Staying Put, a Bradford-based charity that supports survivors of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence. Poems, memoirs and fiction were used as prompts to help the women to put their feelings into words. The project has generated significant benefits for participants. Reading and writing about coercive control has, to quote members of the group, ‘enabled me to access parts of trauma that felt stuck and been a massive part of my healing experience’, ‘shown me that how domestic abuse was written about historically is still very relevant to domestic abuse today’, and demonstrated that ‘coercive behaviour has gone on for years. I've learnt more about it, I didn't know anything about it until I found myself being coercively abused’. The group was inspired by the belief that imaginative writing can make a difference, that it can serve both an educative and a therapeutic purpose, and, crucially, that it can help to prevent future abuse.