I’m delighted to have been awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Public Engagement grant for a project titled “Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and its Disorders”.
For this project, part of my wider work on “Writing the Sleep Crisis“, I will collaborate with the team of the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research directed by Prof Jason Ellis, The Sleep Charity, and artist and creative producer Chiara Dellerba. The project will result in a workshop series, an online art exhibition, and resources.
Supported by The Sleep Charity’s expertise we will design a hybrid workshop series in which participants from the Newcastle area having difficulties sleeping will come together with researchers and the artist to share stories, explore sleep and wellbeing knowledge, and express their lived experiences of sleep and sleep disorders creatively.
The creative outputs produced at the workshops will be collected into an online exhibition. This exhibition will also feature creativity prompts that will allow a wider audience to delve into their experiences of sleep. Responses submitted to these prompts will be added to the exhibition, creating an ever-expanding archive.
The online resources created by the researchers with The Sleep Charity will bridge the literary/cultural side of sleep and the psychology of sleep, engaging new audiences with multidisciplinary research and facilitating individual reflections and independent workshops.
The project aims at co-producing knowledge of sleep and its disorders with workshop participants, stimulating public understanding and empathy, and fostering wellbeing.
Image credit: Chiara Dellerba