Environmental Sustainability, Health and Global Challenges

This theme focuses on topics related to environmental sustainability, climate change, and global environmental and health challenges, including mental health. It highlights the cultural impact and urgency of addressing environmental issues and promoting sustainable practices on a global scale. We ask how cultural interventions can help us imagine and build a more sustainable future.

Examples: changing the stories around anti-microbial resistance, tackling work-related suicide, art therapy, the politics of blood donation in Japan.

Moving Mountains (Rebecca Jarman)

Led by Professor Rebecca Jarman, Moving Mountains is a collaborative project that documents the intergenerational impacts of geological disasters at sites across the Americas and Europe. Guided by the experiences of disaster survivors, our work incorporates research methodologies and creative practices to uncover how planetary forces give shape to life-systems in mountainous regions prone to seismic activity, volcanic eruptions, extractive practices, and the effects of a changing climate. Together, we are creating a disaster heritage programme that features theatre, art, film, literature, podcasts, and educational resources. Moving Mountains is currently sponsored by an AHRC Fellowship, and has previously received funding from sources including AHRC Language Acts, the Newton Fund, and the British Council. Find out more at mountainsmoving.org

Project Create (Paul Cooke)

Arts-based mental health research, using creative practices like music, theatre, dance, drawing and poetry, is enjoyed by many young people and can bring new insights and understanding about adolescent mental health in ways that traditional, often adult-led, research methods cannot. However, the potential of such work is held back by a number of research barriers, not least a lack of a shared understanding about how the specific processes and outcomes of individual arts-based research works in the context of mental health research. Taking as its case study arts-based mental health research exploring the issue of adolescent loneliness and led by Professor Paul Cooke and Professor Siobhan Hugh-Jones at the University of Leeds, this MRC/AHRC-funded project works with an interdisciplinary team of researchers, young people and arts practitioners to develop this shared understanding while also supporting youth-led advocacy around the impacts of adolescent loneliness.

Work-related Suicide and mental health research (Sarah Waters)

Professor Sarah Waters’ research is focused broadly in the areas of global mental health, comparative labour studies and French studies and she uses arts and humanities approaches to develop new understandings and cross-disciplinary insights. Her monograph Suicide Voice. Labour Trauma in France (Liverpool University Press, 2020) analysed the phenomenon of work-related suicide in France during the 2000s.

Her research has been supported by AHRC, Wellcome Trust and Research England. She publishes in a wide range of cross-disciplinary journals, including recently French Politics, Culture & Society, The British Medical Journal, Global Labour Journal and the Journal of Public Mental Health.

She co-leads the Leeds Interdisciplinary Mental Health Research Network that brings together researchers and policy-makers from across all research fields to collaborate on questions of mental health. She was the lead academic organiser of WUN’s first global mental health symposium that took place in Leeds University in June 2024.

She campaigns on work-related suicide in the UK and France and has presented her work to the French Ministry of Health, the Department of Work and Pensions, the Samaritans and the Health & Safety Executive. She is a member of the Hazards campaign and lobbies for a legal recognition and prevention of work-related suicide. In this guise, she has made two submissions to UK parliamentary enquiries.

Her work has featured widely in the media in the UK and internationally and she has contributed to radio programmes, podcasts and televised interviews. She was awarded a Women in the Spotlight award from N8 Research Partnership in March 2024.

Issues in Global Health Research (Paul Cooke, Cat Davies, Jieun Kim, Mani Sharpe, Sarah Waters)

LCS scholars have been at the forefront of creating alternative, cross-disciplinary and methodologically innovative approaches to some of the major challenges in global health, drawing on film, text, language and ethnography. Their research offers rich and creative perspectives on lived human experience across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts worldwide.

Professor Paul Cooke’s research focuses on the role of arts-based practices and film-making in addressing global health challenges. He leads the Create project that addresses adolescent mental health and he is co-lead on Community Engagement for Antimicrobial Resistance (CE4AMR), a network of researchers and practitioners who use, or are interested in using, community engagement – in particular participatory and creative approaches – to tackle antimicrobial resistance in low and middle income countries.

Cat Davies is Professor of Language Development. Her research focuses on children’s early language, literacy, and education. Since 2020, Cat has worked on several cohort projects investigating the effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns on children’s development: Social Distancing and Development, the Impact of Covid on Key Learning and Education, and Born in Covid Year - Core Lockdown Effects. These projects provide evidence and recommendations informing the Department for Education’s approach to post-pandemic recovery.

Dr Jieun Kim is a socio-cultural anthropologist focusing on the study of social marginalisation and health disparity in Japan and South Korea. Her current AHRC-funded research, Hematopolitics, explores the politics and symbolism of blood donation in Japan and South, employing ethnographic, archival and social media research methods. The project includes a range of public engagement initiatives in collaboration with blood patient groups, artists and a medical museum to enhance understandings of the dynamics of social belonging and othering around blood.

Dr Mani Sharpe, a film studies researcher led an innovative research project that explores how cinematic representations of the face can be used to promote positive mental health. Engaging community practitioners and participants, Facing the Mind generated an archive of audio-visual outputs and creative practice.

Professor Sarah Waters’ research focuses on work-related suicide and her monograph Suicide Voices. Labour Trauma in France was supported by funding from the AHRC and the Wellcome Trust. Her recent work supported by Research England on work-related suicides in the UK featured widely in the national and international media. She has recently been awarded a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award for a four-year project entitled “Work-related suicide. An international social justice analysis”.