Our mission is to foster interdisciplinary research and scholarship designed to promote equitable, just, and inclusive futures.
Our research is shaped by three interconnected strands: greener sustainable communities; wellbeing and healthy communities; and inclusive and prosperous communities. Through these strands, we investigate how creative and participatory approaches can contribute to sustainable communities and address challenges such as climate change, resource justice, and sustainable design; how arts, culture, and inclusive practices can support health, wellbeing, identity, and belonging; and how research with communities can challenge inequalities relating to access, representation, migration, disability, gender, and social justice. By bringing together diverse disciplines, lived experiences, and community partnerships, we seek to develop knowledge and practices that enable communities to thrive.
Our values
PARTICIPATE is a research cluster in the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University that operates in ways that are:
- Collaborative, bridging different bodies of knowledge through interdisciplinary and, participatory approaches, often by working in partnership with civil society and professional organisations;
- Interdisciplinary, developing dialogues across and within existing disciplinary frameworks, theories and methodologies through historical and contemporary approaches
- Empowering, using methods and approaches that build agency and capacity of grassroots actors as well as researchers and students involved;
- Supportive, nurturing the talents of early-career researchers and PhD students in the cluster through sharing of good research practice, involvement in joint projects and providing constructive feedback on each other’s work;
- Empathic, understanding lived experiences despite gendered, developmental and intersectional differences;
- People-centred, enhancing wellbeing and quality of life through improved equity, justice and inclusion.
Supporting our members
We have created a supportive research environment through a range of activities facilitated for and by our members. Regular events and support includes:
• PARTICIPATE ‘shut up and write’ online sessions where we commit to progressing on a particular piece of writing during the session and support each other during brief check-ins;
• PARTICIPATE lunch time talks to build research capacity through invited speakers as well as workshops and presentation hosted by our members
• 1:1 support through our PARTICIPATE mentors
• Funding for small individual projects and writing retreats