Institute for Social Justice
Health and wellbeing
Our research into health and wellbeing.
Across the university we conduct a range of research, practice and training that engages with the lived experiences of health and wellbeing.
Amongst other areas, this includes projects interested in supporting individuals and communities to mental health recovery and personal agency in wellbeing.
This work sits across the arts, counselling, psychology and sport.
Our current projects are:
Converge: Social Justice Practice and Research in Mental Health
Converge at York St John University offers people with mental health issues access to free courses. It provides a model with which to address issues of social justice and equality of access within education and mental health services.
Founded by Professor Nick Rowe, Converge is a longitudinal practice-research project which uses action research, peer research, creative methods and reflective practice to explore the impact of offering educational opportunities to adults who experience mental ill health within a university context. It also hosts the Converge Evaluation and Research Team (CERT), a group of researchers with lived experience of mental health difficulties.
Converge has been funded by Research England and the Office for Students to carry out an evaluation over 2020-2022 of the programme's impact on its participants and partners. For further information email cep@yorksj.ac.uk.
York St John Communities Centre
York St John Communities Centre provides accessible wellbeing services to the wider community.
All services are provided by a dedicated team of staff and students. Counselling is available for a wide range of mental ill-health and wellbeing issues. The Centre provides specialist bereavement and domestic abuse services and research.
Additionally, we are extending our services into coaching for wellbeing and coaching for veterans. The Centre offers an excellent context for our students to undertake practitioner and work-related placements and provides rich opportunities for staff and student research projects of value to our local, regional, and national communities.
To find out more visit the Centre website.
Moving Minds: Dance and dementia
Moving Minds is an innovative project that creates opportunities for people affected by dementia to participate in dance and improvisational movement sessions. The project explores what dance, as a creative embodied practice, could offer people living with dementia and those that live alongside them, and questions how dance might enable embodied expressions of identity and selfhood.
Through adopting an embodied approach to understanding selfhood, Moving Minds provides a direct challenge to the assumption that with impaired cognition there is a corresponding loss of identity.
Led by Elaine Harvey (dance), this project examines how creative embodied practices, such as dance, might provide opportunities to examine the body’s potentiality for innovation and creative action.
To find out more visit the Moving Minds pages.
Working Women and the Menopause
All women are affected by the menopause during their life. Its impact on health, wellbeing and mood can be significant, yet it is largely overlooked in conversations and policies on employee wellness and support. This reflects a wider, disproportionate focus on male experiences at work across research and in wider debate.
As an experience that affects all women, isn’t it time we took a more mature and proactive approach to understanding the menopause and considering the support that women might value from their employer during that period of their lives? The Institute for Social Justice is funding a new, year-long study to explore the experiences of menopausal women and determine what we need to learn and consider, to improve provision for the menopause in the workplace.
For further information contact Dr Sophie Carter.
