Bold Encounters: A new zine on lived experience in research
Bold Encounters, where health systems and lived experience meet, is a zine created to connect projects across the Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities (MCA) programme.
It centres the lived experience and creativity shaping this work - because understanding what people actually experience, and the creativity with which they express it, is essential to building health systems that work for everyone.
Each issue of Bold Encounters will explore a theme emerging from conversations across MCA projects. Our first issue 'The Right to Be Heard', explores how creative approaches enable the inclusion and centring of lived experience in research.
It includes written accounts, photography and video from six Mobilising Community Assets projects, showing the diverse forms creativity can take and the benefits it can have. Together they offer a range of methodologies to explore and a range of benefits that can be realised for research practice, service design and policy.
You can read the first issue here: and find an accessible plain-text version here.
About Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities (MCA)
Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities (MCA) is a three-phase UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funded Research Programme running from 2021 to 2027.
It is coordinated by the Culture-Nature-Health Research Group at University College London, in partnership with the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) and led by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), with Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and Medical Research Council (MRC).
MCA has encouraged the projects it has funded throughout the UK to share knowledge and approaches to integration of community assets into the integrated care structures that exist in the local communities.
