Welcome to Mind Matters – a blog from our research members here at the Beautiful Brain Collaboratory where we explore the field of neurology and the experiences of people living with brain injuries. Each week you find a new blog post about current events, methodological challenges, or future events. This will be a space for us to share with you (our readers) what we’re up to as a research team!
To get us started, I wanted to report on an event we had on March 11th. Led by MA graduate student and artist Jenn Lindsay, we hosted 3 members of the Brain Injury Society of Toronto to an arts-based research creation workshop using collage techniques, brain scans, and arts materials to redefine the images produced by fMRIs of our brains. The idea here was to take medical scans (copied, enlarged, and printed) and craft them so that they represent the lived experiences of brain injury survivors, offering alternative ways of looking at and understanding injured minds.
This workshop was help as part of our commitment as a research team to (1) developing new methods that integrate creative arts and ethnographic methodologies to engage people living with brain injuries and brain trauma in all phases of CBR including design, implementation, analysis, dissemination and evaluation; (2) translating and communicating new knowledge created through these collaborative processes to diverse audiences of multiple stakeholders in the brain injury support and research communities; and (3) developing participant-designed assessment tools to evaluate impacts of participation in arts-based CBR.
These workshops provide participants with an opportunity to make art while reflecting on their experiences with brain injuries and neurological care. Participants and the research team are making and doing, engaged in creative practice, as we discuss experiences with clinicians, family members, caregivers, and the public more broadly.
This is only the first workshop and we have many more planned with our community partners including one on creating soundstories, short collaborative films, improv, and more.
Check out some of our photos of this first workshop. And check out this blog space next week for the next post!
Denielle Elliott