Creative Research Collaborations
2025 Arts, Health and Ethics Collective (AHEC) Seed Funding
The Arts, Health and Ethics Collective (AHEC) seeks to integrate creative thinking into research projects, engage the public through arts-based methods, co-create outputs with artists and communities, and critically examine the ethics of arts-based interventions. This initiative has been further developed by ANTITHESES, in the form of a seed-fund, that provides funding to foster researcher-artist collaborations. These collaborations look to address and consider topics that cause polarisation, disagreement and uncertainty, or investigate alternative methods to standardised public debate.
The ANTITHESES Platform is funding the following collaborative arts-based engagement projects relating to the wider research of the Platform. This seed fund looks to enable initial collaborations and work between researchers and artists/creatives/arts organisations.
In 2025 the ANTITHESES platform committed to funding seven Arts, Health and Ethics Collective partnerships between researchers and artists to explore novel and creative ways of approaching a range of research questions related to issues which can incite disagreement, polarisation or uncertainty.
HEAR MY STORY: ON LAZINESS AND PRODUCTIVITY
Our society is deeply divided about what we owe to those who meet or fail to meet productivity expectations, manifesting in polarised debates about who deserves benefits, educational support, and career progression. This polarisation is driven by implicit judgments about laziness and productivity, compounded by the fact that those across the productivity spectrum rarely engage in meaningful dialogue. By combining ethical inquiry with creative expression, this project will help individuals explore their implicit assumptions, understand how personal experiences shape views, and discover common ground. Ten participants with diverse experiences—from those consistently exceeding productivity standards to those labelled 'lazy'—will participate in a collaborative workshop. Through guided writing exercises developing personal stories into short pieces, participants will practice active listening and respectful dialogue while revealing complexities behind commonly held beliefs. Selected writings will be disseminated through multiple channels, creating lasting resources for communities affected by productivity-related polarisation and demonstrating how creative approaches foster constructive engagement with contested moral concepts. |
QUALITY OF LIFE IS NOT A MEASURABLE OUTCOME
Healthcare systems worldwide face difficult ethical decisions about cost-effectiveness and resource allocation in a financially constrained environment. How are those decisions made, can personal narratives affect the decision-making process, and if they can, would this be ethical? Intertwining Jamie Hale’s award-winning play, ‘Quality of Life is Not a Measurable Outcome’ with live audience polling, this project aims to explore the tension between personal and impersonal perspectives and directly interrogate how an individual narrative shifts the framework for reflection and discussion. The play will be followed by a sensitive discussion of the ethical dimensions of decision-making, drawing on the academic and personal experiences of both researchers in a spirit of collaborative inquiry. The process of interactive polling will allow the audience to engage in discussion, reflect on the impact on their own thinking and contribute to research into this new and striking approach to difficult and controversial ethical questions. |
STORYTELLING AS EPISTEMOLOGY: ARTS-BASED INQUIRY ON VOICE, AGENCY, AND RESILIENCE IN MUMBAI’S INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS
This project brings together young people and matriarchs from Mumbai’s informal settlements to explore how voice, agency, and resilience are cultivated and expressed in everyday life. What do terms like agency and voice mean in these contexts? How can arts-based tools, such as audiovisual storytelling, contextualise concepts like resilience and agency in mental health ethics? Through participatory filmmaking and radio workshops, community artists & collaborators will co-create a short film and podcast episode reflecting subaltern, plural forms of knowledge often excluded from clinical and academic frameworks. Anchored in the creative infrastructure of Nazaria Arts Collective (a grassroots organisation supporting caste-oppressed and religious minority youth and women), the project explores how non-clinical, arts-based spaces foster affective, spiritual, and embodied well-being. Here, artistic practice is treated not only as expression but as epistemology. Outputs will be publicly shared to generate listening, care, and community dialogue. This collaboration contributes to ANTITHESES by testing new participatory methods and re-situating epistemic legitimacy within community-led modes of knowing. |
DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY AND IMMERSIVE THEATRE: NEW METHODS FOR EXPLORING MORAL DISAGREEMENT
Can immersive theatre develop our understanding of the ways citizens deliberate with each other? Can the stage be a place to address some of the challenges that face deliberative democracy? Can audiences expand the ways we answer fraught moral questions? This project seeks to answer these questions. It integrates deliberative democracy and immersive theatre in order to grow the forms of expression used to resolve moral disagreement. It will explore how narrative, audience engagement, and emotion can help shape recommendations in a deliberative assembly, and so expand a Citizens’ Jury’s typical focus on discussion and argument. Through the iterative design of participatory methods for engaging audiences in a staged Citizens’ Jury event, the research team will explore tensions, limitations, and possibilities for methodological innovation in addressing moral disagreement in deliberative democracy. |
Prototyping a plural archive of care
This project is a collaborative project that brings together health research, artistic practice, and community engagement to explore how care, memory, and identity are shaped in a society where health is increasingly defined through data. Vincent Straub’s research on health behaviours intersects with Deshna Shah’s artistic exploration of symbolic language and identity, particularly her Twilight Language script, which encodes memory and emotion across Hindi, English, and Gujarati. Alongside Mehrunisha Suleman’s expertise in bioethics and cultural perspectives on health, the project creates an interdisciplinary space where art and research work in dialogue. Through a combination of a workshop and exhibition, the project will test creative, participatory formats that invite people to reflect on their family health histories and cultural memories, drawing on sculpture, multimedia, and storytelling. By fostering inclusive conversations across communities and disciplines, it seeks to model pluralist approaches to care, identity, and ethic. |
HELD IN TENSION
HELD IN TENSION is a collaborative project exploring how people navigate deep moral disagreements around climate change and sustainability. Led by researcher David Lyreskog (University of Oxford) with artists Hannah Matthews and Cat Poppensieker, the project gathers public perspectives through research, dialogue, and engagement, transforming them into a hanging wooden sculpture. Made from reclaimed timber and shaped by community contributions, the artwork embodies the fragile balance of opposing values, shifting as new elements are added. In this way, it becomes a living metaphor for the complexities of moral disagreement: unstable, interconnected, and influenced by unknown elements. By combining research, craft, and community voices, HELD IN TENSION makes abstract tensions tangible. It offers a creative space for reflection and dialogue, engaging with difficult questions of value, ownership, and responsibility. In doing so, it aims to foster deeper understanding across divides at a time of increasing global polarisation.
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You can also check out projects from the previous cohort below: